7 ms·

Together: New version of Jami (alternative to Zoom and Jitsi)

140 points by asicsp 6y ago

terhechte 6y ago
I looked into free, native videoconferencing solutions several months ago because I wanted to run conferences on slower hardware. Most webrtc solutions ran too slow for my requirements. Jami worked really well, I could even compile it for my Raspberry pi and it ran with solid quality there. I’m very happy that this exists as open source. Big kudos to the developers.
- znpy 6y ago
  I've got a feeling that most videoconferencing apps push for highest video quality, when the most important thing is audio latency. I wouldn't care if I saw my coworkers in 640x480 as long as I can hear them loud and clear and they can hear me the same.
  - mxuribe 6y ago
    I agree with you, as did my former work colleagues...BUT, this March i started a new job, and the people at this new job were very much used to work at the office, so working from home (due to the pandemic) is still very weird/tough for them...so they all want the highest quality of video to see each other's faces...and in my opinion it helps zero for productivity...it is all because it makes them just feel better ...they even all admit as much. So, clearly there are people out in the world who want features "just because", and that includes "the highest quality of video". <sigh>
    - kybernetikos 6y ago
      Helping people feel better can be good for productivity.
      - mxuribe 6y ago
        While the people at my new job are very nice, I've not yet observed this phenomenon that you speak of. :-)
  - seirim 6y ago
    I would think "decent quality" video would be preferable anyway. I don't need perfect detail of everyone's wrinkles and blemishes and they don't need mine, either.
lwhsiao 6y ago
How well do these peer-to-peer videoconferencing solutions scale with the number of call participants?
- the-dude 6y ago
  How well does the quality of a videoconference scale with the number of call participants?
  - altdatathrow 6y ago
    That's not a comparable question. Peer-to-peer bandwidth requirements for a single user increases linearly with the number of participants while a client-server model is essentially flat regardless of the number of participants.
    - the-dude 6y ago
      Well, both questions question the quality of videoconferences in regard to the number of participants, so I would say the questions are very comparable.
    - randomsearch 6y ago
      That can’t possibly be true. Even if the server integrates all in bound streams into one, doing so takes a non-negligible amount of additional time per user, surely.
      - babuskov 6y ago
        The person you replied to was talking about bandwidth, not CPU load. Imagine a user that only has enough bandwidth for a single stream. If there was a server integrating all other user streams into one, that user would be able to watch it without much problem. Unless, the clients are built in such way that they down-scale the resolution to part of the screen it would occupy on target computers (based on number of participants) before sending video data. Is any software doing this currently? > Even if the server integrates all in bound streams into one, doing so takes a non-negligible amount of additional time per user, surely. Integration has to happen at one point. Whether a server does it or each user's computer.
hda111 6y ago
How can there be an iOS app? I read that Apple doesn’t allow GPL apps in their store.
- firloop 6y ago
  Just because a piece of code is licensed under GPL doesn’t mean that the copyright owner(s) can’t license the code under another license, aka the license to Apple. The issue comes when an entity is using GPL-ed code that they don’t also own the copyright to.
  - riedel 6y ago
    According to the iTunes page it is licensed under GPL [1]. So in this case apple would be violating the GPL by distributing it under their terms of service (which in turn would then probably be a violation by Savoir-faire Linux for uploading it). The question then is, who except for the copyright holder could really enforce the GPL. [1] https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/ring-a-gnu-package/id1306951055 https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/ring-a-gnu-package/id130695105...
    - morpheuskafka 6y ago
      By signing the Apple Developer agreement you grant certain rights to Apple with regard to submitted apps--this is in addition to any other licenses such as the GPL. Putting GPL in the app description does not override these rights and does not force Apple to follow the GPL to distribute your app. The issue is that if it is not your code, but someone else's GPL code, you have no right to grant Apple these rights above and beyond the GPL. So my understanding is, if you are going to have a copyleft-licensed app, that accepts contributions from the community, you need to have a CLA that assigns all copyright to you (or specifically authorizes you to grant Apple these rights). "Vanilla" GPL code from someone else cannot be used in an iOS app. Another possibility is you allow people to make their own derivative versions by licensing it under the GPL, but you personally do not accept any contributions from the community. In this case, you own all the copyright and can license it to Apple as needed.
stevenicr 6y ago
Very cool thinking here - especially like the thought and implementation of the “Rendezvous Points”. I can see this being really useful for many different types of chats and groups. I am needing to replace an old chat system soon, and may kick the tires with pushing this to some users for testing, but first: Is the ip addy of the users sending and receiving - so it's easily discoverable or is it possible to make this use an intermediary server like a STUN/TURN kind of thing? Sadly with some of our members, they will do anything to snatch another user's ip addy and use that for blackmail and hacking - so we need to make sure we can hide it. Moderation - is there an admin level for users that we can give access to see other participants ip addys and option to kick / ban / block ip addy, certain usernames, ip subnets, CIDR notation, ASNs / etc. ? Some problematice people have caused us to ban and block over a few million ip addys to slow down their returning to troll.. if we can't easily see and block ips we won't be able to use it for our public groups. But I can see how this is really cool for small groups that know and trust each other, really like the thoughts of use going here in this post.
- upofadown 6y ago
  >Sadly with some of our members, they will do anything to snatch another user's ip addy and use that for blackmail and hacking... This is pretty interesting all by itself. How does this work?
  - stevenicr 6y ago
    There are several different methods, and several different types of people I have encountered doing this kind of thing over the years. 1 type - the jealous 'friend' who wants to be more. Another is the [insert superhero term here] - that stands up to [someone mean, someone disagree, someone whatever] that has wronged someone else they like in the chats. The spurned ex-lover / friend. The firm "X is evil, and if you defend Y then you deserve blah blah' - collateral damage is just a thing that is needed to defend the world from Z.. Of course we also have some 'pro/am' oh whats the term, 'ewhoring' I think if google still shows results from the various blackhat forums - gives broke people instructions on how to befriend then blackmail in chats in general - we have traced dozens of these scammers to those types of forums. A few other types we have encountered - but on to some of the hows we fought. Some have used firewall software, others used flash-jacking programs to pull a list of ips that connected to our group chat rooms. We fought that in different ways. Then we discover that our system for displaying avatars that allowed people to use an an image hosted third party - well that got abused - the tecky peeps could host their avatar on a server they could see access logs or software that showed views / access logs - so they could get ips that way. We later discovered some hackers using a similar method by posting images in the chat room - then looking at access logs for those - they would then move to private chats or smaller chat rooms and do the same - thus limiting the ips to check. For a while I did not believe these things were actually happening. We coded a ghost/invisible admin option - when peeking in on some private chats I saw they could tell immediately a third ip addy was in the chat at the time.. that was helpful in discovering some of the methods they were showing friends how to get info on our users though. When I saw messages like 'screw person B - don't worry I'm going through their myphoto and docs right now.. I thought yeah right.. but then proof came that yes indeed they were doing that at that exact moment. I believe much of this was before shodan - but not sure. Anyhow they would do ip tracing - and use that info to scare people - sometimes they would find the person's ip leads to an exploitable router and break in and gather data. Sometimes they used that data to ruin lives - emails, CCs - all that.. that's when I discovered some lists of 'evilthings you can do when you have someone's addy or/and phone number - including the 4chnFb1PatyVan and crap. If they couldn't break into their router (I estimated about 65% of our users had outdated routers/firmware over the years) - they would go into social hacking if the 'scare them by showing you know their city / location by ip' was not enough.. A common thing that started occurring was facebook friending - then getting / trading naughty pics - then gathering the list of all their fbook friends / associates and sharing said pics with all of them if not send X paypal for example.. Fighting all this led to even bigger battles sometimes - where we had to switch hosting a bunch of times cuz increasing DDOS is easy. Getting caught in the middle of some anony vs [group they hate] - is not a fun place to be I've found. There's been some other things all those sorts of things had led to - but trying not to write a book here. Anyhow, skipping several stories.. here lately my biggest pain in the butt has been this 15 year old in Canada. The worst troll in our history - he may be 17 by now.. apparently has lawyers as parents, and uses their money to have dozens of VPN services at the click of a button. He comes in, makes several accounts.. chats for a while - gets mad - starts posting things that border CP depending on the juristiction and interpretation I guess - pisses off 100% of our users- and we ban him - then he's back - and we ban ip subnets - and he comes back with 6 logins.. we ban those.. It's led to us banning tens of thousands of ips - writings hundreds of letters to various ISPs - getting in touch with authorities and lawyers and all sorts of things. Well he keeps coming back now and again and ruins things in the chats in many ways - harassing some people, exploiting others. If we didn't have moderators that could view ips of our visitors we'd never know who was who and what blocks of ips to ban just to make some peace. Wish we had access to the kind of VPN blocking lists that the big players have - that would help. Oh there are many more things in relation to all this we've been through over the years. I love giving chat options to the world to share and connect, but it's been a struggle so many times. Moderation tools are oftentimes overlooked for other features I've found. Just yesterday I saw a news story something like during zoom class some school kids all watched some abuse or sex or something start - and the teacher was like 'logoff, logoff now!' - and I wondered - does zoom not have kick/ban/block/report / ip save / things like that built in? I have not used it in years, and never used it with more than 2 people at a time so never checked.
theobeers 6y ago
This seems like a nice project. I was wondering about the backstory of the name Jami, which I associate with a great fifteenth-century Persian poet (جامی)—really one of the towering figures in the millennium-long tradition of classical Persian poetry.[0] But according to the project website,[1] they took the name from a Swahili word for "community,"[2] which is in turn derived from Arabic (جميع or perhaps جامع). Sorry to go off on a tangent! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jami [1]: https://jami.net/help/ https://jami.net/help/ [2]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jamii https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jamii
DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
this is free but is it open source? I could only find an option to download via the package manager but no links to the source or how to build it myself.
- quadrangle 6y ago
  Jami is a GNU project backed by the Free Software Foundation and distributed under a GPLv3 license But yeah, it is very weird then that they don't seem to make it easy to get the source. Bad design of the website. Under "contribute" there seems to be links that will get to the source https://jami.net/contribute/ https://jami.net/contribute/
- amarok1412 6y ago
  https://git.jami.net https://git.jami.net (mirror of https://review.jami.net https://review.jami.net and https://review.jami.net/admin/repos https://review.jami.net/admin/repos) https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/ https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/ (another mirror but on github) https://docs.jami.net https://docs.jami.net
anticensor 6y ago
How does it compare to Jitsi and BigBlueButton in terms of scalability?
jtbayly 6y ago
I tried this out today for the first time on my iPhone and Mac with a couple other people. The iOS app kept crashing, and I couldn’t figure out how to use the same account on my computer and at various times either the video or audio or both weren’t working for somebody in the call. Gave up in the end, sadly.
morsch 6y ago
The blog post is from two days ago, is the Android version out? The version on Play store is two weeks, the one on Fdroid two months old.
musicale 6y ago
I'm amazed that Zoom has so much uptake. Even disregarding the malware-like behavior of its installer and the ongoing security issues, I've never had a satisfactory experience with Zoom. It's particularly bad for conferences with lots of people - the audio quality is choppy and often unintelligible, and often the audio will just cut out entirely after a couple of minutes. Moreover, the video and screen sharing features don't seem to work reliably either. I've had drastically better experiences with basically any other system: Google, Microsoft, Cisco/Webex, Gotomeeting.... all seem to actually work. I haven't tried Apple's group facetime but they'd have to work pretty hard to make it worse than Zoom.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  You are absolutely in the minority with your experiences then. Zooms success is unarguably due to its comparably smooth operation. Granted, some other services offer better video and audio quality, but it's often dependent on location, and zoom is more graceful at lower bandwidth than most other systems anyway. Most important, it's ease of use (precisely due to their malware like installer behaviour among other things) and thoughtfulness (as creepy as it might be) makes it the most "reliable" service for most and hence you see it's success. You are not left fiddling with installers and multistep protocols just to get into a video call.
  - spurgu 6y ago
    Have you tried their web client, for those of us who aren't comfortable putting up with Zoom's shenanigans? Pretty much unusable.
    - Sebguer 6y ago
      And to that person's point, by using your web client, you are significantly in the minority. Most people are comfortable putting up with Zoom's shenanigans. Whether or not they should be is a completely separate question.
    - ramraj07 6y ago
      Anyone who knows tech reasonably knows Zoom does some "unscrupulous" things to provide a seamless VC experience. To me, it's a bit clear that unless you also control the underlying OS (even when you do apparently), they are doing whatever they need to get what can be considered basic UX needs of a VC app. Contrary to popular belief in places like HN, the average Joe isn't a dipshit, they really don't care about these lapses from Zoom and will very happily make these concessions evenn if they're fully educated on everything to know about security. I'm not a technotard and mostly know everything and I make the concession. It's not even clear to me they're being genuinely unscrupulous anyway. This is like not trusting the government when they do mass surveillance but more benign. The majority of the population has decided they are not worried about it, right or wrong, they just want to get on with their life. Keep complaining for sure, we need dissent, but don't argue that Zoom isn't good at what it does, the only argument might be that it's practices aren't ethical. You choose to use the web application it's your choice not theirs.
spurgu 6y ago
I suppose it's due to technical reasons why there's (seemingly) no web client? It's a big plus for Google Meet and Jitsi (the Zoom web client is practically unusable).
bjoli 6y ago
What a coincidence! I installed Jami today and had a video chat just hours ago. It went very smooth, but I complained about the chats not syncing. The ring/Jami folks have really done an amazing work!

140 points by asicsp 6y ago

I looked into free, native videoconferencing solutions several months ago because I wanted to run conferences on slower hardware. Most webrtc solutions ran too slow for my requirements. Jami worked really well, I could even compile it for my Raspberry pi and it ran with solid quality there. I’m very happy that this exists as open source. Big kudos to the developers.

znpy 6y ago
I've got a feeling that most videoconferencing apps push for highest video quality, when the most important thing is audio latency. I wouldn't care if I saw my coworkers in 640x480 as long as I can hear them loud and clear and they can hear me the same.
- mxuribe 6y ago
  I agree with you, as did my former work colleagues...BUT, this March i started a new job, and the people at this new job were very much used to work at the office, so working from home (due to the pandemic) is still very weird/tough for them...so they all want the highest quality of video to see each other's faces...and in my opinion it helps zero for productivity...it is all because it makes them just feel better ...they even all admit as much. So, clearly there are people out in the world who want features "just because", and that includes "the highest quality of video". <sigh>
  - kybernetikos 6y ago
    Helping people feel better can be good for productivity.
    - mxuribe 6y ago
      While the people at my new job are very nice, I've not yet observed this phenomenon that you speak of. :-)
- seirim 6y ago
  I would think "decent quality" video would be preferable anyway. I don't need perfect detail of everyone's wrinkles and blemishes and they don't need mine, either.

lwhsiao 6y ago

How well do these peer-to-peer videoconferencing solutions scale with the number of call participants?

the-dude 6y ago
How well does the quality of a videoconference scale with the number of call participants?
- altdatathrow 6y ago
  That's not a comparable question. Peer-to-peer bandwidth requirements for a single user increases linearly with the number of participants while a client-server model is essentially flat regardless of the number of participants.
  - the-dude 6y ago
    Well, both questions question the quality of videoconferences in regard to the number of participants, so I would say the questions are very comparable.
  - randomsearch 6y ago
    That can’t possibly be true. Even if the server integrates all in bound streams into one, doing so takes a non-negligible amount of additional time per user, surely.
    - babuskov 6y ago
      The person you replied to was talking about bandwidth, not CPU load. Imagine a user that only has enough bandwidth for a single stream. If there was a server integrating all other user streams into one, that user would be able to watch it without much problem. Unless, the clients are built in such way that they down-scale the resolution to part of the screen it would occupy on target computers (based on number of participants) before sending video data. Is any software doing this currently? > Even if the server integrates all in bound streams into one, doing so takes a non-negligible amount of additional time per user, surely. Integration has to happen at one point. Whether a server does it or each user's computer.

hda111 6y ago

How can there be an iOS app? I read that Apple doesn’t allow GPL apps in their store.

firloop 6y ago
Just because a piece of code is licensed under GPL doesn’t mean that the copyright owner(s) can’t license the code under another license, aka the license to Apple. The issue comes when an entity is using GPL-ed code that they don’t also own the copyright to.
- riedel 6y ago
  According to the iTunes page it is licensed under GPL [1]. So in this case apple would be violating the GPL by distributing it under their terms of service (which in turn would then probably be a violation by Savoir-faire Linux for uploading it). The question then is, who except for the copyright holder could really enforce the GPL. [1] https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/ring-a-gnu-package/id1306951055 https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/ring-a-gnu-package/id130695105...
  - morpheuskafka 6y ago
    By signing the Apple Developer agreement you grant certain rights to Apple with regard to submitted apps--this is in addition to any other licenses such as the GPL. Putting GPL in the app description does not override these rights and does not force Apple to follow the GPL to distribute your app. The issue is that if it is not your code, but someone else's GPL code, you have no right to grant Apple these rights above and beyond the GPL. So my understanding is, if you are going to have a copyleft-licensed app, that accepts contributions from the community, you need to have a CLA that assigns all copyright to you (or specifically authorizes you to grant Apple these rights). "Vanilla" GPL code from someone else cannot be used in an iOS app. Another possibility is you allow people to make their own derivative versions by licensing it under the GPL, but you personally do not accept any contributions from the community. In this case, you own all the copyright and can license it to Apple as needed.

stevenicr 6y ago

Very cool thinking here - especially like the thought and implementation of the “Rendezvous Points”. I can see this being really useful for many different types of chats and groups. I am needing to replace an old chat system soon, and may kick the tires with pushing this to some users for testing, but first: Is the ip addy of the users sending and receiving - so it's easily discoverable or is it possible to make this use an intermediary server like a STUN/TURN kind of thing? Sadly with some of our members, they will do anything to snatch another user's ip addy and use that for blackmail and hacking - so we need to make sure we can hide it. Moderation - is there an admin level for users that we can give access to see other participants ip addys and option to kick / ban / block ip addy, certain usernames, ip subnets, CIDR notation, ASNs / etc. ? Some problematice people have caused us to ban and block over a few million ip addys to slow down their returning to troll.. if we can't easily see and block ips we won't be able to use it for our public groups. But I can see how this is really cool for small groups that know and trust each other, really like the thoughts of use going here in this post.

upofadown 6y ago
>Sadly with some of our members, they will do anything to snatch another user's ip addy and use that for blackmail and hacking... This is pretty interesting all by itself. How does this work?
- stevenicr 6y ago
  There are several different methods, and several different types of people I have encountered doing this kind of thing over the years. 1 type - the jealous 'friend' who wants to be more. Another is the [insert superhero term here] - that stands up to [someone mean, someone disagree, someone whatever] that has wronged someone else they like in the chats. The spurned ex-lover / friend. The firm "X is evil, and if you defend Y then you deserve blah blah' - collateral damage is just a thing that is needed to defend the world from Z.. Of course we also have some 'pro/am' oh whats the term, 'ewhoring' I think if google still shows results from the various blackhat forums - gives broke people instructions on how to befriend then blackmail in chats in general - we have traced dozens of these scammers to those types of forums. A few other types we have encountered - but on to some of the hows we fought. Some have used firewall software, others used flash-jacking programs to pull a list of ips that connected to our group chat rooms. We fought that in different ways. Then we discover that our system for displaying avatars that allowed people to use an an image hosted third party - well that got abused - the tecky peeps could host their avatar on a server they could see access logs or software that showed views / access logs - so they could get ips that way. We later discovered some hackers using a similar method by posting images in the chat room - then looking at access logs for those - they would then move to private chats or smaller chat rooms and do the same - thus limiting the ips to check. For a while I did not believe these things were actually happening. We coded a ghost/invisible admin option - when peeking in on some private chats I saw they could tell immediately a third ip addy was in the chat at the time.. that was helpful in discovering some of the methods they were showing friends how to get info on our users though. When I saw messages like 'screw person B - don't worry I'm going through their myphoto and docs right now.. I thought yeah right.. but then proof came that yes indeed they were doing that at that exact moment. I believe much of this was before shodan - but not sure. Anyhow they would do ip tracing - and use that info to scare people - sometimes they would find the person's ip leads to an exploitable router and break in and gather data. Sometimes they used that data to ruin lives - emails, CCs - all that.. that's when I discovered some lists of 'evilthings you can do when you have someone's addy or/and phone number - including the 4chnFb1PatyVan and crap. If they couldn't break into their router (I estimated about 65% of our users had outdated routers/firmware over the years) - they would go into social hacking if the 'scare them by showing you know their city / location by ip' was not enough.. A common thing that started occurring was facebook friending - then getting / trading naughty pics - then gathering the list of all their fbook friends / associates and sharing said pics with all of them if not send X paypal for example.. Fighting all this led to even bigger battles sometimes - where we had to switch hosting a bunch of times cuz increasing DDOS is easy. Getting caught in the middle of some anony vs [group they hate] - is not a fun place to be I've found. There's been some other things all those sorts of things had led to - but trying not to write a book here. Anyhow, skipping several stories.. here lately my biggest pain in the butt has been this 15 year old in Canada. The worst troll in our history - he may be 17 by now.. apparently has lawyers as parents, and uses their money to have dozens of VPN services at the click of a button. He comes in, makes several accounts.. chats for a while - gets mad - starts posting things that border CP depending on the juristiction and interpretation I guess - pisses off 100% of our users- and we ban him - then he's back - and we ban ip subnets - and he comes back with 6 logins.. we ban those.. It's led to us banning tens of thousands of ips - writings hundreds of letters to various ISPs - getting in touch with authorities and lawyers and all sorts of things. Well he keeps coming back now and again and ruins things in the chats in many ways - harassing some people, exploiting others. If we didn't have moderators that could view ips of our visitors we'd never know who was who and what blocks of ips to ban just to make some peace. Wish we had access to the kind of VPN blocking lists that the big players have - that would help. Oh there are many more things in relation to all this we've been through over the years. I love giving chat options to the world to share and connect, but it's been a struggle so many times. Moderation tools are oftentimes overlooked for other features I've found. Just yesterday I saw a news story something like during zoom class some school kids all watched some abuse or sex or something start - and the teacher was like 'logoff, logoff now!' - and I wondered - does zoom not have kick/ban/block/report / ip save / things like that built in? I have not used it in years, and never used it with more than 2 people at a time so never checked.

theobeers 6y ago

This seems like a nice project. I was wondering about the backstory of the name Jami, which I associate with a great fifteenth-century Persian poet (جامی)—really one of the towering figures in the millennium-long tradition of classical Persian poetry.[0] But according to the project website,[1] they took the name from a Swahili word for "community,"[2] which is in turn derived from Arabic (جميع or perhaps جامع). Sorry to go off on a tangent! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jami [1]: https://jami.net/help/ https://jami.net/help/ [2]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jamii https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jamii

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago

this is free but is it open source? I could only find an option to download via the package manager but no links to the source or how to build it myself.

quadrangle 6y ago
Jami is a GNU project backed by the Free Software Foundation and distributed under a GPLv3 license But yeah, it is very weird then that they don't seem to make it easy to get the source. Bad design of the website. Under "contribute" there seems to be links that will get to the source https://jami.net/contribute/ https://jami.net/contribute/
amarok1412 6y ago
https://git.jami.net https://git.jami.net (mirror of https://review.jami.net https://review.jami.net and https://review.jami.net/admin/repos https://review.jami.net/admin/repos) https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/ https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/ (another mirror but on github) https://docs.jami.net https://docs.jami.net

anticensor 6y ago

How does it compare to Jitsi and BigBlueButton in terms of scalability?

jtbayly 6y ago

I tried this out today for the first time on my iPhone and Mac with a couple other people. The iOS app kept crashing, and I couldn’t figure out how to use the same account on my computer and at various times either the video or audio or both weren’t working for somebody in the call. Gave up in the end, sadly.

morsch 6y ago

The blog post is from two days ago, is the Android version out? The version on Play store is two weeks, the one on Fdroid two months old.

musicale 6y ago

I'm amazed that Zoom has so much uptake. Even disregarding the malware-like behavior of its installer and the ongoing security issues, I've never had a satisfactory experience with Zoom. It's particularly bad for conferences with lots of people - the audio quality is choppy and often unintelligible, and often the audio will just cut out entirely after a couple of minutes. Moreover, the video and screen sharing features don't seem to work reliably either. I've had drastically better experiences with basically any other system: Google, Microsoft, Cisco/Webex, Gotomeeting.... all seem to actually work. I haven't tried Apple's group facetime but they'd have to work pretty hard to make it worse than Zoom.

ramraj07 6y ago
You are absolutely in the minority with your experiences then. Zooms success is unarguably due to its comparably smooth operation. Granted, some other services offer better video and audio quality, but it's often dependent on location, and zoom is more graceful at lower bandwidth than most other systems anyway. Most important, it's ease of use (precisely due to their malware like installer behaviour among other things) and thoughtfulness (as creepy as it might be) makes it the most "reliable" service for most and hence you see it's success. You are not left fiddling with installers and multistep protocols just to get into a video call.
- spurgu 6y ago
  Have you tried their web client, for those of us who aren't comfortable putting up with Zoom's shenanigans? Pretty much unusable.
  - Sebguer 6y ago
    And to that person's point, by using your web client, you are significantly in the minority. Most people are comfortable putting up with Zoom's shenanigans. Whether or not they should be is a completely separate question.
  - ramraj07 6y ago
    Anyone who knows tech reasonably knows Zoom does some "unscrupulous" things to provide a seamless VC experience. To me, it's a bit clear that unless you also control the underlying OS (even when you do apparently), they are doing whatever they need to get what can be considered basic UX needs of a VC app. Contrary to popular belief in places like HN, the average Joe isn't a dipshit, they really don't care about these lapses from Zoom and will very happily make these concessions evenn if they're fully educated on everything to know about security. I'm not a technotard and mostly know everything and I make the concession. It's not even clear to me they're being genuinely unscrupulous anyway. This is like not trusting the government when they do mass surveillance but more benign. The majority of the population has decided they are not worried about it, right or wrong, they just want to get on with their life. Keep complaining for sure, we need dissent, but don't argue that Zoom isn't good at what it does, the only argument might be that it's practices aren't ethical. You choose to use the web application it's your choice not theirs.

spurgu 6y ago

I suppose it's due to technical reasons why there's (seemingly) no web client? It's a big plus for Google Meet and Jitsi (the Zoom web client is practically unusable).

bjoli 6y ago

What a coincidence! I installed Jami today and had a video chat just hours ago. It went very smooth, but I complained about the chats not syncing. The ring/Jami folks have really done an amazing work!