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Comment by Jaxan | Hacker News Reader

I understand the hate for Zoom. But...

We have tried Jitsi a few weeks ago. And we couldn’t scale to meetings with more than 5 people. We tried our own server and theirs.

Then there is Skype and Hangouts. With both I can only meet for two hours or so on battery.

Somehow Zoom works flawlessly. Very easy setup and it worked straight out of the box and is not CPU hungry.

The UX is also great. It’s clear what the buttons are and do. Compare that to Skype where it’s not even clear when something is a button, and even then it’s often just an icon, which means nothing to me.

The product is great. But you pay with your personal data, I guess...

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> The product is great. But you pay with your personal data, I guess...

I doubt it's any worse than what you give out to Google or Microsoft for their solutions. After all, those are targeted advertising companies. Zoom had bundled the Facebook SDK to enable their social login, but removed it after the discovery that it phones home.

Lots of people up in arms about Zoom et al but I personally don't care. If Microsoft or Zoom wants to foot the bill to give me HQ video I'd rather take that then waste my own bandwith on p2p.

Some of the security threats to zoom are real of course, but I couldn't care less if Microsoft uses telemetry or whatever if I get a good service in return. I log into 20 different things with Google and Facebook and Microsoft already

Did anyone use Firefox? There's a fairly significant issue with video simulcast in FF, and if anyone on the call broadcasts video on FF it will use significantly more bandwidth than users on Chrome/Chromium-based browsers.

Tbh zoom on Linux is utter garbage. Every time I join a meeting, my CPU goes into deep frying territory. It's like compiling on heroin. In all fairness skype has been the most reliable for me so far, with jitsi being a close second.

Jitsi uses WebRC, so it's p2p. It's great for 2 person calls, could be good for 3 as long as you all have good connections to each other, but doesn't and will never scale higher.

I think this is just false. If you have more than 2 people I think there will be some bridge which picks the speaker and downscales other video feeds

Jitsi can work in either peer-to-peer mode or with a "videobridge" that acts as a server in much the same style as Zoom et al.

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