Like many users of Skype I don’t want to link to FaceBook contacts (having long since deleted my presence there) and I don’t want see ads. Opening Skype should default to the Contacts list, and while I’ve no solution for that, I have worked out how to stop Skype on a Mac from loading the Skype Home window contents. The solution involves Little Snitch.
Create a rule to deny connections to apps.skype.com:
Allow other connections when prompted by Little Snitch (as a peer-to-peer programme it’s not feasible to create rules for the many IP addresses Skype will attempt to utilise):
No more Skype Home content:
Not perfect, but better. There’s an interesting suggestion here, but I couldn’t get it to work.