How does Jitsi handle 500-person+ conference calls these days? This is the killer zoom feature - it looks like Jitsi can handle up to 500 now. https://jaas.8x8.vc/#/comparison .

That's personally not enough for many remote companies. So if we're going to have to have Zoom on our machines anyway (to handle an all-company meeting), why not just use it for the rest?

Are 500-person conference calls actually productive? Surely the number of speakers in any such meeting will be a small percentage of listeners?

It's useful.

It's more of a large-scale broadcast situation. Think of large corporate town halls, town council meetings, etc.

You can just have a conference call with the 5-10 speakers and use broadcasting software to stream it to the audience, why do they need to be in the conference?

Why setup a separate broadcast when listeners can just join the meeting room?

Yes, I know it's more comfortable that way, but if you have to decide between giving all your data from all your meetings to a random US company and a slight annoyance whenever you do conferences with more than 500(!) participants, the choice is pretty simple to me.

Giving all the data to zoom probably means also giving it to most US law enforcement agencies (should they request it), that would be a big no no for me.

Not to mention that until very recently even MS Teams sent you to a different product when you wanted to stream to 500 people. Even if it's now integrated, it's still a different product inside (and e.g. you could for example open a new window when you were in a 500 people "meeting" at the time when you still could not do so for a regular meeting).

For the corporate or training use case, this is not a problem. If you are worried about US law agencies, you shouldn't be using any system that isn't rooted in face to face communication for anything sensitive. (And even that is suspect with as small as bugged devices are today.)

There is a huge difference between requesting data that has already been collected and requesting Zoom/Microsoft/Google to record future data. The latter probably requires some serious intent. And of course, if I would want to be entirely safe from US law enforcement espionage then I would need to not use computers but whose use case is that?

You say "just more comfortable" but if you have two streams and one of them is on a channel you know to be unreliable (Jitsi) it's pretty guaranteed the unreliable stream is going to be down a significant percentage of the time. If you're a company with 500 people this isn't a comfort question, you're wasting probably hundreds of hours of your employees' time.

I think we're not on the same page about Jitsi being unreliable. In fact, it has been more reliable for me than Zoom in the past. Maybe due to the fact that I'm running Linux, I don't know, I haven't tried either on Windows.

Because then you have the option to use less specialized software (not Zoom).

Live Q&A is a nice feature.

Conference for the speakers + unlisted livestream on YouTube could handle that, using chat for Q&A.

Chat lags for 5-120 seconds depending on livestream settings, writing is much slower than speaking, does not always convey the question as well as sound, and is close to impossible to do on the go.

They allow substantially less than 5. Tho trying is indeed slower for most people.

So, then... you're bound by youtube's TOS, you can't prevent people from getting in (usually via login), and Zoom makes it a nice experience instead of a hack.

Oh, and you can also do sub-rooms with Zoom, which has some applications in these types of meetings.

They don't actually suggest using YouTube. The point is just to illustrate that this is a very common and relatively simple concept. There are tons of tools able to accomplish this.

In my experience there will be always some guy ranting for minutes so I learned to really appreciate town halls with a few speakers and taking questions written in the chat.

For the Q&A section that comes at the end, usually.

You don’t need to be in the videocall to ask a question; you can do it via chat.

Zoom has a mode that basically does this for you, which I assume is how they support >500 users.

At some point though why not just collect questions beforehand, record the whole thing and let people watch it on their own time. At that scale there'll be no integrity during the meeting anyway.

You'd be surprised how much chat happens as a side channel. Further, collecting questions means that the presentation material would have to be out there first, and that misses the point of the town halls, where financials and other initiatives are often first presented to the larger organization.

Out town halls usually ask for questions beforehand and that works quite well.

Because that's how you end up with projects that take 3 years to plan instead of 3 months. A live Q&A where all of the experts who can answer questions and everyone interested in the subject who may have questions are in the same room (live or virtual) is a lot more productive compared to what you are suggesting.

If something they said in the main presentation was missing important details that you need to do you work, why do you need to wait days/weeks for them to gather all the questions, find all the answers, and publish a video, when they could just answer it live in a few seconds?!

Having 500+ people on a project is how something takes 3 years to plan.

"At that scale there'll be no interactivity during the meeting anyway."

There is interactivity. Each company has their own way of doing this, but it's typical that they have someone reading the chat to gather questions and that higher ranked employee can directly speak to ask questions.

Very... Particularly when the CEO announces half of those present are sacked...

So it only needs to support 250 participants, really.

For real, theres no 500 person conference calls, just mostly a one way broadcast with a stream of questions.

City wide Town halls where every one can listen in but pre-registered people can ask questions are a productive usecase for public information. Those buildings can't accommodate 500 people.

It may be that only a small subset of people will talk, but it's not necessarily the case that you know which subset beforehand. When the software can handle it, it's much easier to have everyone join a single call than it is to make sure that the right three people and two meeting rooms have access to talk, and guess which one other person out of about 250 might be called on to provide more context on an answer.

And I suspect that for most people -- including me -- Zoom accounts are "effectively unlimited". I wouldn't expect that many people to attend one of my meetings. The Internal Events team have licenses that allow for more attendees; I have a 500 attendee limit and I doubt I've ever gone above 50.

Specifically because of the discussed TOS.

> 500-person+

that is called broadcast media -- it was actually better thirty years ago than it is now. If you want conversation then you make a panel, and have a single microphone for the rest.

Come on, 500+ calls are a very niche use case. With plenty of alternatives at that

+1 for Jitsi. They are awesome, lightweight, and just work with the least hassle.

Pretty bad that many nontechnical users are not aware of it compared to Google Meet or Teams.

This is just a marketing problem aint it?

Unfortunately, one big marketing resource is also owned by said competitor...opps. So where are those antitrust laws again?

lightweight? they are literally the only video chatting service I use that makes my laptop fans spin up.

I am yet to find a modern video chat that isn't draining the battery of any laptop. From old Xeons, to fairly recent Ryzen and even M1/2 Macs.

It's a bit puzzling, actually. I don't think Skype and TeamSpeak had the same effect on computers back in the day. Just how much local processing are they doing these days? It's crazy

It's most likely due to the fact they are all electron apps rather than they are doing "something".

Hardware decoding is also an issue.. as in, not being used. Old webcams used to do h.264 encoding in hardware. Encoding has since now moved to the CPU which may or may not be fine.. the next issue becomes the codec chosen.. most stuff all has h.264 decoding in hardware.. but it's not being used anymore.. instead they're trying to use vp09 or h.265 or av1 which in many cases requires CPU-based software encoding and decoding.. so the fans rev up like turbines.

I feel certain the reason this is happening is because some middle-manager terrorist in a boardroom said "use this codec it won't require as much network data usage! value for the shareholder!" without asking first whether hardware encoding is beneficial even if there's a bit more network traffic with the older codecs.

Really burns me up. I do not want to use software encoding/decoding if I have hardware support.

I think Google Meet uses VP9, which is really annoying.

Bandwidth is the limiting factor in a lot of circumstances, and networks are very challenging to manage. Especially with an increasing number of users on mobile connections, reducing network usage can be the right call.

But performance matters, too, of course. It's tricky to balance them.

> electron apps

Which only adds limited overhead to certain cases. Unless they are encoding/decoding video directly in JS...

Correct, teams doesn’t use videotoolbox so it’s software encoding. Probably not directly in javascript per se, it’s probably calling a native library, but it’s hot because teams doesn’t use hardware encoding.

Video encoding and decoding is expensive! Especially as cameras improve and users' expectations of quality increase.

Zoom is reasonably light and uses hardware acceleration on anything modern (e.g. my 2015 MBP).

I tried it at the beginning of the pandemic and my siblings phones all drained during the hour long call.

A lot of us technical users have never heard of it either lol

It's also much more responsive than teams. They seem to optimize frame rate over resolution and teams seems to do the opposite.

Having used both I find the framerate more important as it's much easier to interpret quick facial expressions. But teams looks glossier which makes it easier to sell I guess.

For faces that might be true. I've had issues with different tools when sharing a full desktop session on a 4k monitor.

Have you experienced anything like this other commenter mentioned?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37022878

Nope it works great for me, we always use it with the ham radio club and it performs admirably.

Worst is relative. Zoom has the lower barrier to entry for normal users (who far outnumber us nerdy type) than any other app in it's class. Worst for privacy, best for usability, many argue.

Worst for privacy best for usability is the norm. Most B2C stuff is almost predatory. The only exceptions are at the high (cost) end of the market, and Apple to some extent.

If you aren’t paying in either time (DIY) or money, you are probably being exploited.

Apple is also the high cost end of the market.

I started using matrix internally (with element as a client) which uses jitsi under the hood for video/voice chat. Quality is amazing.

We've been using self-hosted matrix for the past 3 years with our jitsi instance and I tend to agree with you.

It's reliable and privacy preserving.

Element Call is going to be pretty great once it is production-ready and has E2EE enabled by default (a branch of it already has it on.)

Not anymore actually. The jitsi integration was just a temporary thing but 1:1 video chat already works natively.

I use Zoom for work and never got an email explaining that suddenly they can use call recordings to train some AI models and sell this to 3rd parties.

Actually, they only affect their hosted meet.jit.si service, right? Not if you self-host Jitsi on your own server (which you should if you're a medium-large company, for data protection and all that)

Of course. If you run it yourself, you're free to train your neural nets on your users, if that's something you want to do

For restrictions on what you can do with the code, you'll need to check the code's license, not the hosted-service's terms of use

Also HN user jeltz below mentioned:

> I have tried most of them: Google Meet, Teams, Slack, Discord, Skype, Jitsi and so far I liked Jitsi the most and Skype the least.

Skype became really really terrible, it looks like it's been unmaintained during the past 10 years, I'd rate its usability worse than most open-source software. The sound quality is also awful, it feels like I'm calling a landline.

Where do you live? In the US at least, landline (AKA POTS) is still the gold standard for audio quality.

Not parent commenter, though facetime audio or telegram audio is my preferred for audio quality.

I live in France, landline had a distinct background white noise to it that somehow Skype managed to imitate. Switching to any other software feels like you're upgrading to HD audio.

It’s called “comfort noise,” and was an option in Lync/Skype for Business. A lot of users being switched from desk phones, especially older ones who still primarily used landlines at home, found themselves wondering if their conversation partner was still on the line without it.

In the US I don't know a single person that has access to POTS. Discord (with paid nitro) is the gold standard for quality and latency, followed by all the free VoIP apps

I live in the US, and I'm pretty sure everyone I know has a landline, though a good number of them are now digital/fiber/whatever. Some people I know still have multiple landlines, as it's cheaper than paying multiple cell bills if necessary. I know at least one person who used to have call forwarding set up to get calls on their cellphone, but with the current state of marketing calls they probably don't do that anymore.

I may be too much of a zoomer but I haven't seen a landline in years, nearly a decade actually.

I'm not sure who still has them

The only people I know who still have a landline are my grandparents who are in their 70s

> everyone I know has a landline

We clearly live in very different bubbles

> digital/fiber/whatever

VoIP

> cheaper than paying multiple cell bills

Nobody pays multiple cell bills unless they wanna use several data-only eSIMs from different carriers to get better speed/coverage. If you just want a lot of phone numbers, you can port your numbers to a VoIP provider and forward them. Way cheaper than a landline

I'm in the US and landline was dogshit compared to modern discord/whatsapp/whatever.

Maybe it's cause old phone mics sucked but it wasn't great.

For various reasons I have a bunch of different groups where I use different videocall software for regular meetings - Zoom, Jitsi, Teams, Skype, Google Meet and Webex.

Out of all those, Jitsi is the only one where I can't rely on the core functionality - video calls and screensharing for small meetings (5-6 people); I have had multiple cases when we've had to switch to something else because the video/audio quality simply wasn't sufficient, but a different tool worked just fine for the same people/computers/network.

Like, I fully understand the benefits of having a solution that's self-hosted and controlled, so we do keep using self-hosted Jitsi in some cases for all these reasons, but for whatever reason the core functionality performs significantly worse than the competitors. Like, I hate MS Teams due to all kinds of flaws it has, but when I am on a Teams meeting with many others, at least I don't have to worry if they will be able to hear me and see the data I'm showing.

Bigger servers?

Not sure there would be a decent enough return on investment, especially if the other tools they regularly use provide more reliable service at no additional cost.

Won't help. I've had multiple callers encounter trouble with what I guess WebRTC traffic due to browser extensions, "anti" virus software, VPN policies etc. Zoom etc. works fine. They usually fixed it by switching to a personal phone instead of a work laptop but in general, the situation is not tenable.

Section 4 of the Jitsi Meet's ToS grants them similar rights. It's just with mushier language.

> You give 8×8 (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works..., communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, and distribute such content solely for the limited purpose of operating and enabling the Service to work as intended for You and for no other purposes.

IANAL, but it seems like that would include training on your data as long as the model was used by them as part of their service.

Everyone who operates a video conferencing service will have some sort of rights grant in their ToS. Zoom is being more explicit, which is a good thing. If Jitsi wanted to be equally explicit, they could add a clause clarifying that this does not include training AI models.

Wait, what is "the service" here?

As I understand it, it refers to using meet.jitsi.si, not "another service" someone might provide by downloading the Jitsi software and running it on their own server.

Please correct me if I'm wrong since this would give me cause to reconsider running a Jitsi server.

It's "the Service" with capital S, indicating that it is a term specifically defined in the contract. Here "the Service" is defined as "the meet.jit.si service, including related software applications". If that's not vague enough, article 2 gives 8x8 the right to change, modify, etc. the Service at any time without any notice.

The guys at 8x8 may be well intentioned, but their lawyers have done their best to not give the customer any basis to sue the company in any foreseeable circumstances. That is what company lawyers do, for better or worse.

Regardless, it appears that at present time jitsi is not including AI training in their service, and there is no explicit carve-out in their terms for AI training. However, by article 2 they do have the right to store user content, which might become a problem in the future.

Self-hosting Jitsi is the better option. Or BigBlueButton, and there are more self-hosted open-source Zoom alternatives.

Do you happen to know of others by any chance. For self-hosted video call solutions, looks like Jitsi and BigBlueButton (BBB) are the only decent options out there.

There's now also https://github.com/vector-im/element-call.

They have SFU support as of recently, so it should scale similarly to Jitsi et al.

QOS (Quality-of-Service) rules might starve your traffic of bandwidth. Are you sure you have perfect "Net Neutrality" on your side?

You would be well advised to use services where the traffic travels through https on port 443 on the server (because it's been my experience that it tends to get pretty good QOS favorability). My own little rule of thumb: "you can connect to any port you want, so long as it's port 443 https." ;)

On the other hand, tls/443 is pretty undesirable for media delivery in videoconferencing because a) it's tcp-based and the required ACKs mean a big reduction in throughput and increase in latency, especially in the presence of packet loss, and b) most video services these days (and open source servers) use webrtc which encrypts the data in transit already--so the tls encryption is a waste of resources

Though tls/443 is usually still supported because it's most often allowed by even restrictive firewalls and networks

> Do you happen to know of others by any chance.

There's Galene, <https://galene.org>. It's easy to deploy, uses minimal server resources, and the server is pretty solid. The client interface is still a little awkward, though. (Full disclosure, I'm the main author.)

> solely for the limited purpose of operating and enabling the Service to work as intended for You and for no other purposes.

To me (a former corporate lawyer) the "for You" qualifier would limit their ability to use content to train an AI for use by anyone other than "You". Is there an argument? Yes. But by that argument, they would also be allowed to "publicly perform" my videoconf calls for some flimsy reasons that don't directly benefit me.

it isn't for you solely/exclusively. If it "improves" the service for everyone - that includes "you".

Yep, I acknowledge that is a possibility, but it would also lead to them having permission to display literally the entirety of my videonconf calls to anyone, for advertising purposes or some other purpose that only incidentally benefits me. That would be a strained reading IMO.

> solely for the limited purpose of operating and enabling the Service to work as intended for You and for no other purposes.

Pretty sure this clause would rule out any advertising purpose. The main idea here is - will they use your feed to train AI models (for segmentation / background filters etc)? Things that do evidently improve the service for everyone including "you".

Additionally courts consider the fact that users have little if any say in the terms and thus tend to take the most restrictive but still reasonable view of any uncertainty in the terms.

Basically "if you wanted it you could have asked for it, if you didn't then that is a problem".

Yep, contracts of adhesion, and construing against the drafter: both favor the user here.

To misquote Bill Clinton, it depends on what the means of 'you' is.

More like a certainty :)

I write these policies for my day job and I agree with this.

> I write these policies for my day job

My regrets :-p

"You" is a defined term in Jitsi's Terms of Service.

>...any legal entity or business, such entity or business (collectively, “You” or “Your”)

In case this is meant to imply that perhaps my business and your business are both part of the same "You", they are not. They are each a party to a separate contract with Jitsi; we are not all party to one huge contract with each other (which would hypothetically allow Jitsi to do anything with our content for the purpose of helping them serve all of us).

Something like: If I have a call with you once, theoretically I might have a call with you again in the future. If they use my content to train "your" AI that would improve our theoretical future call, too, and is a "for me" use, I guess?

And I might have a call with any other zoom user, too, potentially, maybe. So really they are doing me a service by using my content all over the place — who knows, it might benefit me at some point!

Jitsi App Privacy:

→ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jitsi-meet/id1165103905

And Zoom:

→ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id546505307

Looks like one company likes to gobble data more than the other even if both privacy policies are gobble-open.

Jitsi is at least reasonably self hostable, minus the inability to have users to login without some effort.

What I take to be the TOS for Google Meet (it's a little hard to tell!) makes no specific reference to AI, but does mention use of customer data for "developing new technologies and services" more generally. https://policies.google.com/terms#toc-permission

Not yet.

Zoom noise canceling is really good, it can filter my children screaming in the background. Very useful for WFH people

Also jitsi can easily be self hosted which means no information will leak altogether.

I've refused to install zoom since they installed a Mac backdoor and refused to remove it until Apple took a stand and marked them as malware until they removed it. And that was far from their only skullduggery.

> how companies choose the worst software!

A local accounting firm with 4 employees just wants their conferencing software to work - Zoom does that better than anyone else.

There is nothing "worst" about that. In never ceases to amaze me that this community is so out of touch with the general populace.