Contributor meeting notes 19-Jan-21

[Alex Sadovsky]

Hi Simon,

I think I should add my $0.02 here.

> We already IRC a lot. This is partly about getting to know each other.
> What is the benefit of jitsi? I believe I am permitted to use it,

Jitsi is a free and lightweight solution: it's free/open-source and there's also a free public server (more than one, strictly speaking: 1 official cluster + several 3rd party public servers).
It doesn't require installing anything (just a web browser), it doesn't require registration (although anyone can use self-hosted instance and configure access control lists as they wish), it doesn't limit meeting duration. As far as I know, it's also not blocked in China (while most commercial solutions are blocked for years, google products are among them, although they're popular and VPN helps sometimes), this is beneficial too.
I wanted to suggest Jitsi during previous discussion as I'm using it for several years and it does its job pretty well (just one job, though: no built-in file sharing, no fancy chat formatting, just audio+video meetings and plain-text chat).

It's quite sad for me to see so many people prefering that proprietary Z**m thing and struggling with its limitations last year while there are mostly better free products that are enough for most use-cases but just didn't get enough attention.

Cheers,
Alex