Recently I felt the urge to try Skype. Fsirst time.
What are the pros and cons of Skype?
And why would I not use Skype?
Some possible alternatives might be:
Google Hangouts
LINE
Twitter
WhatsApp

I have never used any of these. Years ago I did Google voice, but stopped using it.

I just would like to have a good way I can talk to people without using my phone. Video is not important. Bit it might be good.

Any ideas? Alternatives you missed:

Discord
Slack (Doesn't have Voice Chat so I GUESS it doesn't apply here)
TeamSpeak
Mumble.


When it comes to voice chat stuff the main concern is getting everybody to agree to use one. I use Skype for my Work because, even though everybody hates it it's the one that everybody happens to have an account with and it hasn't gotten bad enough that there has been a significant push to say "Alright, everybody we are using IRC/Discord/Slack/etc. from now on.".

Skype works well for me. I use it when on the road to chat back home for free. Only issue is if bandwidth is not so good you then might as well shut off the video feature and just chat through it and not choke off the trickle of bandwidth. If your connected and your bandwidth is erratic or choked down pretty badly skype will let you know, as well as they have frequent surveys asking how your connection was and all to try to better manage it I guess.

Prior to skype I used Ventrillo for voice chat in which I had a computer back home that was a Ventrillo server... this was 6 years ago before switching to skype, but I could have 4 other people connected at same time under the 5-person free use home private ventrillo server license.

I also had a WHS RUNNING back 6 years ago in which due to poor bandwidth at hotels and wanting to send video messages and them being too large for e-mail attachment, I would record videos and then upload them to my WHS while on the road and my family would post their video messages to me through the WHS and it worked very well. Some videos that are say 200MB in size I just would logon to my WHS and then SET to download and then go to dinner and come back and it would download it through the 256k/64k poor hotel satellite connection and im I was lucky it would be ready to watch when I got done with dinner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Home_ServerFor some REASON I could not download Discord.
I will give Skype a try. I've used Skype, although not in recent months for reasons not related to Skype. My experience with it was positive.

Facebook might also be considered an alternative to Skype. Facebook has a video call feature.