My team and I built some of the world's most decentralized videoconferencing software, using WebRTC. You can try it on https://yang2020.app/meeting https://yang

My team and I built some of the world's most decentralized videoconferencing software, using WebRTC. You can try it on https://yang2020.app/meeting https://yang2020.app/meeting for example ... but it's available in all of our apps, including for teachers, etc. Since a major point of our platform (qbix.com/platform) is to avoid relying on external third parties, that meant we built a version of livestreaming that is completely peer-to-peer. Imagine a giant tree at whose root are the WebRTC participants "on stage", the ones getting their feed directly get the least lag, and then people just join different parts of the tree (and ask to rejoin if the parent node dropped out or is too slow). Here is what we learned: 1. On some platforms, it's hard to turn off the audio listening, because you can't turn it back on later. So you have to just disconnect the audio stream going out, but it's still being captured. 2. When someone is "muted" in a chat, what this really means in P2P setups is that the peers have to "respect this setting" and simply ignore the audio/video stream that the one muted is sending. 3. Sometimes, it's very valuable from a business standpoint to grab the incoming video, and do eye recognition and face tracking (yes we support all that too, in our platform, it's available in Javascript). So a teacher can, for example, take attendance and know which students are no longer present or engaged, without actually seeing their feed. All of it is done on the client side of the student, and with their consent. Each of 1, 2, 3 can lead to a determined "hacker" kid making it seem like they're listening when they're not, etc. But there are some cool tricks to make it really hard and expensive to pull off perfectly. We use this, for example, to award credits to people for completing educational materials or listening to a show, as with https://ftl.fm https://ftl.fm