Zoom Alternatives

With the huge amount of issues with Zoom, I’m wondering what Zoom alternatives are around.

I know that @lukecyca tried the public hosted Jitsi Meet, which looks cool, and Slack (premium) also does video calls as does Discord, but I’m curious what else is around and what people’s experiences have been?

Thanks!

I know folks who really like Jitsi. Many local schools and businesses are using MS Teams, but not sure it that works for individuals.

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I’ve been using Jitsi for personal things, and had mostly good experiences so far.

I’d have suggested Jitsi for the EGM, but haven’t tried it with larger groups, so wanted to use something I’d be confident wouldn’t have issues we’d be fighting with our first time doing a GM via video conference.

My experience with Slack’s video calls are lackluster - poor quality, stuttering, etc.
Hangouts is adequate up to about 10 people. They also have the weirdest audio issues - they do their own echo cancellation, and it can get in weird states.

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Yeah, in my experience Slack calls mostly had sync issues at the start.

I think Jitsi mostly has public WebRTC infrastructure, but it looked okay so far. Maybe I’ll see if I can do some sort of test with a bunch of people soon.

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Zoom should be considered an insecure platform, please do not share anything over it you not share publically.

[https://news.mingpao.com/pns/國際/article/20200405/s00014/1586023405872/認將用戶數據傳中國-zoom稱失誤

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/04/us/nyc-schools-zoom-online-security/index.html

Another open source option is BigBlueButton. I haven’t used it yet, but it sounds interesting - unlike Jitsi it supports presentations and moderation, as it’s made for classrooms.

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There’s one called Bluejeans used in all the post-secondary ed-tech circles. I believe it passes all the student privacy requirements. Haven’t used it for a while and don’t know pricing plans or anything. It was free for us.

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