Except with Jitsi you can self-host the entire back-end. These apps seem to depend on Twilio's infrastructure, as the READMEs mention needing a backend to generate Twilio tokens.

But they are open source (Apache licensed), so that can be changed.

Potentially, one could make a fork that can use either one’s own backend or Twillio’s, while Twillio’s own can only use Twillio’s.

Is it trivial to write a backend that will replace the functionality in Twilio's backend?

It may not be entirely trivial but if enough people are willing to contribute it could be trivial on an individual basis.

I'd be interested in giving it a go. If anyone else is, just leave a comment on this issue. https://github.com/ethanwillis/oss-twilio-video-backend/issu...

Right, but you're talking about starting an open source project whose complexity is similar to that of Jitsi's backend. It may be hard to attract contributors until there's a proof of concept.

That's fine. What I'm really looking for is just an expression of intent to contribute once a plan is in place. I don't mind taking the first whack at a proof of concept.

However if people do want to contribute early on I'd welcome that :)

Probably not, but it might be possible to write simpler "shim" which would go between this frontend and jitsi backend.

Yes, maybe. For that to work, I guess you'd need the concepts (rooms etc.) to be similar enough, so that you can convert the control messages in a way that makes sense, and you'd need the media formats/chunking to be close enough.

It's not going to work 100%, as the Twilio API can do stuff that Jitsi doesn't (e.g. the choice of video being transferred p2p or via the server).

But if you're going to do that, then you're using Jitsi mainly for media transcoding/multiplexing. So maybe it would be easier to use that code in Jitsi directly and write a new API layer, rather than writing a shim above the existing API.

I wasn't aware of Jitsi - I really like Twilio but Jitsi's ability to self host elevates it to another level.

Also BigBlueButton, which is geared towards education, but also does video conferencing well.

https://bigbluebutton.org/

Thank you for sharing this. I had never heard of this project before -- and it looks pretty good!