Eclipse is a Skype recreation built from scratch in Rust. I’ve been working on it on-and-off for about 3 years now, and since then it’s undergone several revisions, language changes, etc.
NOTE: Eclipse is not a revival of Skype or its servers, it is meant to imitate the look and feel of Skype along with adding modern features and a secure, cleaner, open source backend.
Eclipse isn’t focused on accuracy so much as it is recreating the feel of Skype and classic IM apps, so please don’t yell at me saying it’s not “accurate enough”. You can yell at me if it doesn’t feel nostalgic enough though.
It’ll be 100% open source and free.
It operates on an “instance” system where anybody can host and connect to an Eclipse instance, which has its own owner and moderation, think Mastodon. I’m unsure if you’ll be able to connect to people on other instances yet, we’ll see. I don’t have the resources or time to host and moderate a central server that everyone connects to, so this instance system is a good alternative.
Features
So far I’ve implemented a lot of the basic chat and calling features. Including but not limited to:
- Contacts
- Groups
- Calling
- An admin panel for instance admins
- Themes for Skype 7 and 6, with more to come! (including some original themes)
- Screen Sharing (both in groups and DM calls)
- Emojis, as well as the ability to request custom emojis be uploaded to your instance
- User submitted ads with the same request rule as emojis
- and much, much more.
Planned Features
- Slash commands
- Soundboards
- User profiles with banners, about me’s, and more.
- Some MSN quirks like nudging ported over.
It’s coming along pretty nicely, and I’ve been actively using it as a replacement for Discord with my friends for a couple days now and it’s been working great!
Is it available to download?
Not yet, but I’m rapidly approaching a state where I can release an open-source GitHub repository for this project, along with an initial 1.0 build. No release dates though, sorry.
Screenshots
No AI was used in the making of Eclipse, nor will it ever be used.