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Comment by Zambyte | Hacker News Reader

In what way do you find Jitsi limited?

Perhaps BigBlueButton would be another reasonable option?

Jitsi's free service disables video to "save bandwidth" if you have any reasonable amount of participants (3+ in my experience), and doesn't allow you to re-enable it.

Their paid service allows you to tweak this but it starts at $100/mo.

Have never tried BBB & I'm starting to see a lot of folk recommending it here now as I read through the comments... is it available as a service or is it purely a self-host option (website appears to imply the latter at first but I haven't dug into it yet).

Self-host, but you can get hosting through its developer, Blindside Networks (terrible name for a company).

https://blindsidenetworks.com

Ah. In that case, not really the "space" I'm referring to. Was really asking if there's any other non-self-hosted competitors to these services out there?

The free version of Jitsi does, yes. I'm self-hosting my own Jitsi instance and was able to configure the quality settings way beyond anything you can get from Zoom or Google Meet. I can have ten people with 30Mbps 4K video streams on the call at once. The video is responsive, lifelike, and beautiful like you're watching a pre-recorded YouTube video.

Any pointers for self-hosting, specifically on the configuration side?

Jitsi is limited in that any organization big enough to have an IT security policy almost certainly prohibits standing up your own online meeting service for business use. You'll have to use the company-approved service, which is most likely Zoom or maybe Teams or Google. I haven't looked but I'd bet that Microsoft's and Google's terms of use are broadly similar to Zoom's for similar services.

Let’s try to convince our IT admins to approve Jitsi then. If we don’t try then we’ll be destined to Zoom/Teams/Meet.

It's not the IT admins, it's the CISO or equivalent. At their level they will be concerned with approving anything that's not widely popular and may be perceived as an "unsafe" choice. An extension of the age-old "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" line of thinking.

I don't know which companies/CISOs you've worked with but in my experience it's the opposite: CISOs tend to be wary of transferring corp data to 3rd-parties, for both legal/compliance and security reasons. It's generally engineering/IT management that tend to be more wary of self-hosting maintenance.

If they have a competent IT security policy, it will also forbid you to use Zoom, assuming even half the things people are saying in Zoom's terms are actually in there.

Competence is always in short supplly, though.

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