[HN Gopher] The Jami conferencing system
___________________________________________________________________
The Jami conferencing system
Author : zaik
Score : 79 points
Date : 2021-12-03 09:57 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jami.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (jami.net)
| smallerfish wrote:
| Jami's SIP integration is pretty good - I use it with voip.ms.
| They have an unfortunate relationship with Ubuntu, and only
| really take bug reports against snap or PPA builds. Does the job
| well enough though that I ditched my yealink.
| throw0101a wrote:
| When the pandemic started I remember Jitsi being talked about a
| bit as well (as an alternative to Zoom, which had all sorts of
| controversial issues when it suddenly became 'big'):
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitsi
|
| Some discussions that I found with a quick search:
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22669968
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22477785
| heyoni wrote:
| Am I reading that correctly or is it saying you can unmute people
| on the call? That should never be able to happen. A moderator
| should be able to mute people but never unmute them.
| benji-york wrote:
| I'm torn on this one. It is especially an issue when people
| join via phone they may not even know how to unmute themselves
| if e.g., the moderator had to mute them because of some
| background noise.
| amarok1412 wrote:
| There is two level of muted. local mute and moderator mute. If
| somebody is muted locally it can't be unmuted
| heyoni wrote:
| That's clever but maybe too clever? I guess it could work for
| users who dialed in if maybe there was voice feedback to say
| "you are muted" or "you are unmuted". I'm not sure I have a
| great solution for it but it sounds like it could lead to
| users thinking they're muted and continuing on in a private
| conversation.
| amarok1412 wrote:
| there is a label shown and a red icon on the participant
| with the mic crossed
| heyoni wrote:
| Sure, but if I see that and start a conversation with my
| wife or I don't know, turn on the news and someone
| unmutes me, and I'm walking around the house with
| headphones on then I wouldn't see that.
| bandali wrote:
| The moderator and local mute/unmute are separate. If you
| mute yourself locally, no one else can unmute you.
| Similarly, if a moderator mutes you, you locally unmuting
| yourself wouldn't override that either.
| a2tech wrote:
| Thats a great feature and something I've wished for
| constantly as someone who often moderates zoom meetings
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I just had a look at Jami now and I have to say they did a lot of
| things right when it comes to user experience which you don't
| typically see in open-source (and especially not in most GNU
| projects).
|
| Going to their main website clearly gives you a "download" call
| to action with your current platform's logo implying it's
| available for your platform, and below the fold offers links to a
| broad selection of other platforms. It also happily supports
| mainstream proprietary platforms instead of insisting you should
| use Linux.
|
| There is a focus on user-facing features and functionality,
| instead of focusing all on how free/libre or decentralized it is
| or some minor technical detail. These are good, but unless your
| software actually solves the user's problem, freedom or
| technicalities don't matter because they simply won't use it. I
| feel that a lot of decentralized social projects fall into this
| trap.
|
| The website and UI of the clients (at least MacOS & iOS one -
| haven't tried the others) is also good enough. There could be
| some minor improvements to be made here and there (and obviously
| design is subjective), but overall it's a friendly, inviting
| design and color scheme.
|
| I have to give them props for this, it's unfortunately not common
| in FOSS projects, but if there's a place I definitely didn't
| expect this it would be GNU.
| messo wrote:
| Jami has improved alot the last few years, and now I do also use
| it for my business SIP account. I will test out the new
| conferencing features with family soon, Zoom and Skype has never
| worked well for us.
| unixhero wrote:
| MS Teams is the best way. Worth the dollars.
| number6 wrote:
| Yes, it works well enough; but it's sometimes a pain, but not
| enough to move away
| hulitu wrote:
| Teams is a usability disaster. I have to restart it a couple
| of times a day because it will not show the people list when
| i press the chat button. Aparently i shall not use a laptop
| screen to access Teams.
| unixhero wrote:
| Nah. It isn't. We use it with 5000 users. Stable stuff.
| Productive.
|
| EDIT: Not trolling. I just care about having functionality
| that works, not necessarily speed.
| heyoni wrote:
| This is 100% trolling, right? Teams is so painfully slow
| and inefficient compared to almost everything out there.
| hulitu wrote:
| Yes, very productive. My favourite is when i'm in a
| meeting and somebody is sharing his screen. MS thought is
| a good idea to throw a toolbar at the top of the screen
| and some meeting participants icons (big) on the right.
| This eats around 33% of screen space (i'm being generous
| here). To be able to see something i need to go in the
| menu and select full screen. This will make some space on
| top. Now i need also to go in the menu and select focus
| and now i have an image which is approx 85% of the
| screen. The issue is that sometimes the lower part of
| this image is cropped with no possibility to scroll
| (scrollbars are so last centuury). Of course i can scale
| the image till it fits the screen (ehich will scale also
| the programm) but then it is not readable anymore. I
| guess some things are just hard.
| therealidiot wrote:
| Well I use it daily and I can't even scroll up through
| chat history without it getting totally janky. The search
| basically doesn't work, I routinely have to restart it
| and often text shortcuts (like Ctrl+A to select all) just
| stop working completely.
|
| It's not stable at all. Audio calls are generally okay,
| but often screen sharing just doesn't seem to come
| through either.
| rexreed wrote:
| Microsoft really screwed up not taking advantage of its Skype
| acquisition and furthering the technology that Skype had a
| large and early lead at. In my opinion, MS Teams is in many
| ways comparably worse, not that Skype was ever a
| technological darling. Regardless, on my Mac laptop, Teams is
| incredibly slow, difficult to use, and has all sorts of
| challenges with screen share. Might be my setup, but I simply
| don't have those issues with other conferencing apps.
| infl8ed wrote:
| MS Teams has a free version now.
| jsilence wrote:
| Free as in free beer. There is a difference.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Anyone have some thoughts on Jami vs Jitsi? They're both pretty
| robust software at this point but there's not enough information
| out there on the edges of each relative to the other.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Jami doesn't need a web browser, and doesn't need someone to
| set up a server, AFAIK.
| aorth wrote:
| Jami has native GTK/QT clients in my distro's (Arch) official
| repositories. Jitsi has an Electron desktop application that
| exists in the community-maintained repository (AUR). I haven't
| used either of them and my experience with Jitsi has been
| solely limited to the browser client. I'm going to try them
| now.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Same here -- I use Jitsi to have meetings with friends
| sometimes (fun fact you can just go to
| https://meet.jit.si/<any random string here>), and the web
| app has gotten a _lot_ better over the years (it was never
| "bad" IMO).
|
| I am not sold on the necessity of GTK/QT clients over
| Electron applications -- I think the development/packaging
| ease of Electron is exactly why it's where it is today and
| what works for users generally is not wins so I view it with
| dispassion. Doesn't matter how much better GTK/QT is (they
| can't be that good, devs are choosing to "shoot themselves in
| the foot" with Electron just over there!). Also the nice
| thing about web is that phones will at least have a chance
| (even if overheating during the call).
|
| I was more wondering about what it took to run -- Jitsi's
| server requirements always seemed a bit too heavy weight --
| it requires like 4 things to run. That said, I just took
| another look at the documentation[0] and it's pretty well
| written... Maybe it's time to roll my sleeves up.
|
| [EDIT] Did not know Etherpad[1] (one of the things that jitsi
| wants you to host along with it) has video capabilities...
|
| We are really spoiled for good F/OSS software these days --
| it's insane how much good software there is out there now.
|
| [0]: https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/devops-
| guide/devops-gu...
|
| [1]: https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite
| rexreed wrote:
| I'm looking for some video of example conferences to see what the
| quality and experience is like. Curiously hard to find something
| on YouTube with people demoing their Jami video conferences.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| Jami is great. You can create users in seconds, have multiple
| users active simultaneously in the same client, make them call
| each other and have a big video conference with all your alter
| egos. 10/10 if you don't have friends.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-12-03 23:02 UTC)