Ask HN: Zoom alternatives which preserve privacy and are easy to use?

[behnamoh]

unfortunately, all online meetings in our institution are over Zoom. I never trusted the company for obvious reasons. but given their new ToS, I'm looking for alternatives that respect privacy.

Any alts must enable desktop sharing and must be easy to use by old people.

[tornato7]

I set up Jitsi on my home server yesterday using their Docker guide [1]. It took about an hour to get it working and another hour to configure it to my liking. I was able to tweak the settings to allow 4K audio/video quality that blows away Zoom. So far I've used it a few times and it's a much nicer experience than Zoom, which always tries to get you to download their buggy and telemetry-filled desktop client.

1. https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/devops-guide/devops-gu...

[andreashaerter]

I think the quite new project OpenTalk might be worth a look. Quite a lot activity currently.

Code: https://opentalk.eu/en/open-source-code-und-community

Demo: https://opentalk.eu/en/demo

A bit of additional background info: https://opentalk.eu/en/news/opentalk-now-open-source-under-e...

[ezedv]

Have you considered Jitsi Meet? It's open-source and offers end-to-end encryption. Signal also has a video call feature, known for its strong privacy focus. Additionally, Microsoft Teams with its recent security enhancements could be worth exploring.

Each has its own strengths, so it's all about finding the right fit for your needs!

[uticus → ezedv]

> If Jitsi doesn’t make any money, how can it continue to support the project?

> 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. [0]

...as someone paranoid of the "we're free!" advertisement so prevalent everywhere on Jitsi's site, I found this helpful.

[0] https://jitsi.org/user-faq/

[demosthenex]

I have evaluated GNU Jami a few times for screensharing. They had some tweaking to do a year ago, I haven't checked recently. I really like their network model, no servers.

[LinuxBender]

I don't see a lot of options that would preserve privacy [1]. Anything hosted by someone else would require an iron clad contract that stipulates specifically what they may and may not do with your data with serious financial consequences for a contract breach meaning it blocks all executive bonuses. I personally would not trust E2EE implemented by a cloud service run by others. I have worked along side of numerous executives that would happily violate a customer contract if the end result advances their career.

Anything self hosted would require dedicated staff and the upstream should provide a friendly development environment that could accept code contributions from all the companies that use their product. Maybe that is Jitsi based on other threads here? There seem to be mixed experiences. And that probably depends on how many people would be simultaneously using the platform as well as how many developers are going to contribute up-stream. An example of this concept was OpenStack. Many companies eventually contributed up-stream but those contributions ramped up a little late and many people already had a sour taste in their mouth. People still use it but the adoption is not what it could have been.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_conferencing...

[korginator]

I've been down this road a few times over the past few years. Aside from zoom or a company-managed MS teams service, we found the alternatives just too troublesome to get working properly across larger groups of people.

Take google meet for instance. There are already two versions of this app on the play store. One is "google meet (original)" and the other is just "google meet". The weird thing is that both of them are regularly updated, and the "(original)" app was last updated just a week ago.

As for alternatives like Jitsi, perhaps I can get it going, and perhaps a few people would join for a few weeks. The interest will slowly die out as people go back to what they know - zoom or teams. My mother in her 70's uses zoom to collaborate with others on some work that she does - they understand the privacy issues but they simply won't accept the hassle of changing to something else. Not unless zoom does something really bad.

[adevero]

Per updated TOS: "Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen-sharing, attachments, or other communications like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom’s or third-party artificial intelligence models. "

[uticus]

> ...given their new ToS...

I'm assuming you are referring to concerns like laid out here [0]?

[0] https://stackdiary.com/zoom-terms-now-allow-training-ai-on-u...

[behnamoh → uticus]

Yes, opt-out policies are bad enough. When it's not even possible to opt-out, then I'm out.

[cutthegrass2]

On a slight tangent, have zoom ever publicly disclosed how their service is architected?

I believe they invested heavily into designing their own audio/video protocols based on UDP but with specific enhancements.

Grateful if anyone here as specific knowledge in this area and is willing to share.

[nullindividual → cutthegrass2]

They (used to) use SILK as their audio compression/codec, created by Skype.

https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto...

[_kb]

Depending on the scale or your organisation (and budget): https://www.pexip.com/ is a pretty incredible platform.

[Kalpeshbhalekar]

Check this out: https://atlas.scoutflo.com/product/OpenVidu

[j1elo → Kalpeshbhalekar]

I'm a dev working on OpenVidu [1]. Just chiming in to say that OpenVidu is not an alternative to Zoom, but a toolbox you would use to create a Zoom alternative.

Think capturing video from the webcam, sending it out and distributing to other viewers, controlling publish/subscribe permissions, recording sessions, things like that are done by OpenVidu. You would then get those and put them together to build a Zoom-like product.

As part of the project, we do ship OpenVidu Call [2], which is a complete example of how to make a fully featured videocall app with OpenVidu.

[1]: https://openvidu.io/

[2]: https://openvidu.io/openvidu-call

[weikju → Kalpeshbhalekar]

Actual website: https://openvidu.io Git repo: https://github.com/OpenVidu/openvidu

Not affiliated, just trying to save a moment or two of confusion and some extra clicking

[I_am_tiberius]

I wanted to look into Element/Matrix for my company but found out that their smallest pricing tier is 50 users.

[smn1234]

already evaluated https://aws.amazon.com/chime/ ?