Jitsi because Zoom is EVIL

Many of the services we use because they are easy to use. And for many of these services, their owners have bad intentions and we know it - but we want what they're offering and we don't know a good alternative.

I've written about this in my Leaving the GAFAMily post, and in a few others. The latest issue, in this crazy virus-y world, is video conferencing. Enter Zoom.

You don't have to look hard to find articles about their bad practices. Best case: they value money over people. Worst case: they actively support an oppressive regime far outside of its national borders.

The CEO (of a tech company) makes claims like "We can't identify the free users" in order to provide end-to-end Encryption (E2EE). And when they ban accounts at the whim of a certain government who likes to run over people with tanks they claim it's because they can't block specific people from joining a room. So, they are able to build a very advanced video conferencing infrastructure, but they get stuck on the basics? I think the alternative is more likely: they are bowing to pressure or being greedy.

I don't know about you, but I cannot accept either of these

So, what then? JITSI!

Who are they? To be honest, I don't really know. But in a way - I don't need to know. You can of course use the service hosted by them: https://meet.jit.si/ , or you can host your own!

I've written before about setting up my Nethserver, and it's still going great. It was relatively simple to set up my own Jitsi on it. I documented the steps in their community forums.

Using my server that costs about $10 a month that is already hosting my e-mail, files, chat, etc. I am able to use Jitsi without issues. So far I've only tried 6 concurrent users and it hasn't flinched. If I do need to have a really big meeting I can easily scale my VM for a couple days (or hours) for less than a dollar.

In short, Jitsi is my alternative for Zoom.

You might be asking: Why not Nextcloud Talk? Honestly? Because it's video capabilities are terrible. It's great for chat, linking files, and even a video call for just two people. But beyond 2 people it completely falls on its face.

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