• Café Life is the Colony's main hangout, watering hole and meeting point.

    This is a place where you'll meet and make writing friends, and indulge in stratospherically-elevated wit or barometrically low humour.

    Some Colonists pop in religiously every day before or after work. Others we see here less regularly, but all are equally welcome. Two important grounds rules…

    • Don't give offence
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    We now allow political discussion, but strongly suggest it takes place in the Steam Room, which is a private sub-forum within Café Life. It’s only accessible to Full Members.

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Use this prefix if you’re flummoxed and need a helping computer hand…
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AgentPete

Capo Famiglia
Guardian
Full Member
Joined
May 19, 2014
Location
London UK
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I don’t know if anyone still uses Skype, the once excellent but much-neglected comms software bought by Microsoft and then abandoned. MS will close the whole thing down in May, so you need to be looking for alternatives now.

Skype served us well, though. It kept everyone together during Covid lock-down, even those in far-flung parts of the world. It even worked in China, very well in fact.

The best alternative I can see so far is Element:

Element | Secure collaboration and messaging
  • Open source
  • Uses Matrix protocol – secure, decentralized
  • Covers all the OS / hardware bases (most other options such as Signal don’t).
  • It’s just as easy to use as Skype, but has more modern collaboration tools built in
 

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