It's our January chat time

[ezdays]

Despite having (supposedly) a Skype account, I've had trouble using it too, and don't recall ever getting it to actually work. 
I thought that Zoom seemed to work well originally, and wonder if it began cutting off simply because, later in the chat, conversation sometimes seem to lag...maybe there's a sensor of some sort that arbitrarily shuts it down, figuring that we've pretty-well run out of stuff to say anyway.

Wayne

Actually, Zoom has the time limit of 40 minutes because they really want you to pay to stay longer, declining conversations not withstanding. That's why we got cut off. The first few times we used it, I got a popup telling me that they were going to be generous and not impose the time limit on that conversation. They also made an announcement that they weren't imposing that limit on the holidays, but they meant just Thanksgiving and Christmas day, and so they cut us off when we were talking just before then.

You should be able to run Skype from your browser, but if you have it installed, it will automatically try to open. I tried it on two computers, this one has it installed because I've used it to talk one-on-one to others, the laptop doesn't have it installed and I was still able to actually talk to myself between the two.  Really weird, with a split screen and the laptop behind me I could see my front and back on the same screen.

The other pluses to Skype are, we can use the same link over and over, same meeting, different day, you can enter a meeting without having to wait to get admitted,  and of course, the 24 hour time limit does put Zoom to shame. Normally, after a hour or two and we do run out of things to say, but we have the option to leave, go to bed, get up and have some coffee and rejoin the meeting if someone else is still there. Think: Mr. Smith goes to Washington. Now isn't that great?????