
Voice and video with non-technical friends and family - ColinWright
I&#x27;d like to get friends and family off Facebook, but one of the things they use it for is calling people, both voice and video.<p>So I&#x27;m looking for a replacement.  Ideally whatever we use would run on both phones and laptops&#x2F;desktops, preferably with a light-weight client.  We would need audio, video, and screen-sharing would be useful.  Ideally it would be P2P, and not controlled by a single entity.<p>Privacy is a concern as a general principle, and I&#x27;d like to be able to avoid joining another &quot;community&quot;.<p>My betting is that such a thing doesn&#x27;t exist, but I&#x27;d be interested to know what trade-offs people think are available and accessible for non-technical people.  Matrix was one option, but I&#x27;ve heard that some people find it difficult to impossible to get audio and video working.  Another option might be Tox, so I&#x27;d be interested in hearing of people&#x27;s experience with that.<p>But all comments, suggestions, and thoughts welcome.  Thanks.
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snazz
FaceTime? That's probably the closest to what you're looking for. It's end-to-
end encrypted, runs on (Apple) phones and computers (which is its biggest
weakness for this use-case), does not require joining a "community", and is
dead-easy to use. Signal is also great and doesn't require an iPhone, although
you have to convince everyone to install the app.

Everything in this space is a trade-off, unfortunately. To my knowledge,
there's no open-source, end-to-end encrypted, decentralized, peer-to-peer,
mobile-friendly, and easy-to-use audio/video calling platform.

Assuming that the solution is end-to-end encrypted, I'm not too worried about
it being OSS or P2P. For non-technical friends and family, the mobile-friendly
part is far more important. Even mobile-only is probably fine for this
particular purpose.

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qwerty456127
I personally prefer Telegram. It's voice call quality (as well as everything
else it offers) feels perfect (your mileage may vary - obviously this depends
on your location, your ISP etc) and the bandwidth consumption is shockingly
humble. It can also let you send voice messages and _video messages_ easily.
Video calling is not there, however - it's a feature planned to be shipped
later this year.

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qwerty456127
Let me mention there is an entire StackExchange site for this kind of
questions:
[https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/](https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/)

You should have posted the question there and submitted a link to it here on
HN.

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_448
Thank you for making my question more palatable for HN readers! Really very
much appreciated. You just made me realise I need to practice my HN question
asking skills :)

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ColinWright
Thank you.

It's not worked, though, since no one is replying. A lot depends on luck as to
whether something gets noticed, up-voted, and replies.

I might try re-posting tomorrow morning (my time) in an attempt to catch a
different audience. Then if there are still no replies, I've found a good time
to ask these sorts of questions is on a Saturday at about 10:00 UTC.

And good luck, I hope you get the information you're looking for. The
answer[0] from maverick74[1] might also be useful for you, but you've probably
seen that.

Cheers.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23526270](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23526270)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=maverick74](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=maverick74)

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rotterdamdev
Jitsi is open source, easy to use (click shared link) and secure.

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qwerty456127
I once used Jitsi (the browser-based version) and my CPU usage went above the
roof (even after I've disabled HD). It felt like my MacBook Air was going to
blow up. Obviously not a battery-friendly app. I still feel like I'm going to
use it again when I need a video conference - just for sake of using self-
hosted free software.

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sethammons
Not a perfect match, but we use zoom.

