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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I like Jitsi, it works well in my personal setting (kids talk for hours with the grand parents)... Other tips?

Another thing that's great about Jitsi is how easy it is to self-host it.

If you are using a system with the apt package manager (such Debian or Ubuntu), you basically only have to run two commands: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/quick-in...

Well, it is indeed easy to self-host it if you happen to already have a https-reachable server running Debian on a common CPU instruction set.

Which I had, yet for maintenance reasons a container-based solution had my preference: https://github.com/jitsi/docker-jitsi-meet

I also like jitsi however haven't had any chance to seriously use it. I wonder if there is any major drawback for jitsi

Jitsi's P2P nature is great for 1:1 or small group conversations if everyone has solid connections. From experience it starts to break down with larger groups, and becomes pretty useless overall if one or two participants have spotty connections.

Jitsi is not P2P for group conversations - all streams are multiplexed by the server (the videobridge).

100% agreed about spotty connections, it does not handle them very well. As long as everyone has a decent connection and enough CPU, it handles groups of 10+ participants just fine. My company ended up switching to Google Meet for reliability reasons, but was a year ago so it might be better now.

firefox support isn't all the way there yet.

https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758

Yeah, it's a shame, had to install the Chromium snap only for this (Ubuntu 19.10). But then it did work very well (don't forget to enable the "record and play sound" permission for the snap.)

Does Jitsi have the option for admins to mute or expel guests?

Yes, admins can mute and kick. And if you allow anonymous channel creation, the first to enter a channel automatically has admin right. I don't know if kicked participants (especially unauthenticated) can re-join at once, after a delay or any other rule.

That's encouraging, but on Jitsi Meet all guests seem to be able to kick out others. Is the option to appoint admins specific to self-hosted instances?

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