I've tried the following in the last few weeks (and several more, but I forget the names): jitsi, cisco jabber, cisco webex, google hangouts, google meet.

Jitsi is definitely the best that I've tried. Jabber is OK, webex is a complete joke, the google ones are OK.

The failure mode for a lot of these services seems to be crappy centralized routing infrastructure. I have way more than enough bandwidth to support like 10x bidirectional 1080p60 streams at, say, 10mbps each, but no service even comes close to that.

I assume that people are working on doing this in a P2P way, but it's hard for some reason.

It's hard because millions of people are on mobile and/or don't have that bandwidth.

Jitsi is already peer-to-peer as far as I know.

On that point, is it actually? I've been messing around with p2p lately and everything is behind a Nat these days, it's almost impossible to do without a relay server which will probably be a dedicated relay server since most clients are going to be behind some sort of router.

And before anyone says hole punching, thats pretty much useless these days since almost all NATs are symmetric Nats now, the outgoing and incoming ports won't be matched the same even if the same socket is the same one. (if anyone is having success with this I'd love to know how they are doing it)

NAT seems like it has been a disaster for the internet. It basically forces us to route things through dedicated centralized servers, actively damping investment and research into P2P technology. Some of the most useful networking things I’ve learned in the last few years have basically been ways to circumvent NAT-induced problems.

Yea that was pretty much how I viewed it as well. There seemed to be a lot of research on p2p research but nat made everything impractical. That being said nat was an necessity due to ip4, but given how widespread it is now I somehow doubt ip6 is really going to make p2p easier

I've never come across Jitsi before - wow, this is fully featured, with screen sharing that works, and even video background blurring! And all for free, amazing!

My only question is how the company behind Jitsi plans to monetise things. This wasn't answered in their FAQ - anyone here know?

From jitsi.org/user-faq/

> We are fortunate that our friends at 8×8 fully fund the project. 8×8 uses Jitsi technology in products like Virtual Office. The open source community and meet.jit.si service help to make Jitsi better, which makes 8×8 products better, which helps to further fund Jitsi. This virtuous cycle has worked well in the past and should continue to for many years to come.

Gah, I'd read the FAQ but somehow missed that, thanks!

Jitsi shows a warning when using Firefox and recommends using Chrome or Chromium. Why? No, thanks.

It doesn't happen any more, the firefox WebRTC API's are more mature now - either that, or you're using an older Firefox, which you really shouldn't.

I'm using v74 and still get that warning. That said, it's working fine, and is one of the only ones to actually work in Firefox at that.

FF v74 on Linux too, tested https://meet.jitsi.si and I do get the warning (otherwise I would not have post my initial message). Even tried disabling uBlock Origin, same orange box in the bottom-left corner.

Interesting. I'll try to see it!

We setup a number of such servers ourselves and don't have any issues with Firefox. The public site at https://meet.jit.si/ also does not show any issues like that right now.

This is due to Firefox bugs like this: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/2835