Hi guys! So I’ve just discovered jitsi meet. My girlfriend might have a good use for this, as she’s tired of the time limit for the free tier of Zoom. Plus, the most recent concerns regarding AI training. So, back to jitsi… Besides the obvious concern of running on other people’s servers…is there any disadvantage to scheduling meetings over just by using https://meet.jit.si/? What are the advantages of self-hosting? Is there any extra feature I’d gain? Any limitation by using their online service?
Thanks!
I have hosted Jitsi publicly for my organisation for a bit and all the while I was hosting it, there was not much difference between it and the one hosted by Jitsi. Sometimes the add-ons like etherpad etc are a bit of a hassle to configure. Sometimes these features offered by the online service are an iteration or two ahead since the folks at Jitsi are actively developing it and have access to alpha/beta builds that are a trouble to implement locally.
Since you are already considering the privacy concerns, there is nothing much remaining. Maybe uptime concerns if third parties are going to use your service too and will shout at you if they can’t access your service.
I also dabbled with hosting it through OpenFire which gives you more granular control over scheduling the meetings. Maybe you could explore that too.
Overall it is a fun thing and you feel fully in control.
Does it still have the bug where if you connect to Jitsi via Firefox (irrespective of OS), then your system would get really bogged down (both ram and CPU) up to a point where you can boil water on you laptop’s keyboard? That is the only thing I can remember from Jitsi. Tried hosting it a few times (5 in total I think) and every single time, when connecting via FF it would have the same behaviour. What is you experience with this?
As far as I know this is no longer a problem if your system supports hardware video encoding for the video codec (vp8/9 or h264 based on server configuration and browser support).
I dabbled with it in pre COVID times. Yes, Firefox support for Jitsi was almost not there back then. Same went with mobile support. Getting others to install apps was always a pain. I never tried cooking Jitsi powered ramen though.
*Self-hosted Jitsi powered ramen - the best there is :-) Thanks for the feedback.
@DontNoodles @iturnedintoanewt Jitsi could be somewhat integrated with Etherpad? Is it something. Worth trying?
I don’t remember how I configured it back then but now there seems to be a nice tutorial for it: https://community.jitsi.org/t/tutorial-etherpad-integration-in-jitsi-meetings/99697
It gives you a nifty tool to create documents collaboratively while you talk. If you are using Jitsi for somewhat serious needs, then I think it is a good addition to have.
@DontNoodles Thank you very much. It’s not serious, only chat tool with friends, but I have both on my server, as separate services so I think I could do something with it.