[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Is anyone hosting their own Jitsi server?
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Ask HN: Is anyone hosting their own Jitsi server?
Just curious to know if anyone is hosting their own Jitsi server or
an equivalent alternative? https://jitsi.org/
Author : asim
Score : 157 points
Date : 2023-05-22 14:54 UTC (8 hours ago)
| antonyt wrote:
| I'm running Jitsi in Docker on a VPS. I use it for voice + video
| chat while playing online games with friends. For this use case,
| I had to do almost no tweaking from defaults, so I have not
| become a Jitsi expert at all. It's been running for about a year
| with no issues I can remember.
|
| One annoyance was that I couldn't figure out how to set up a
| persistent room protected by a code. My goal was to have no
| usernames or passwords, but without allowing completely open
| access - I just wanted to distribute a room name and single known
| password/passcode my friends could use to get into the room.
|
| Since this didn't seem to be possible at the time, I settled for
| requiring rooms to have a "host," which is just me. That way I
| deal with a username and password, but nobody else has to. It
| does make it impossible for the rest of the group to play without
| me, but this isn't an issue for our situation.
| saghul wrote:
| Glad to hear the defaults worked well for you!
|
| Jitsi is xo posee of several moving parts, and making sure
| everything works well out of the box is something we deeply
| care about.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Nice, what are you paying monthly for it? Seems like this could
| be useful to me too.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| I set one up on my basement server when the pandemic hit for my
| church, since Zoom's free meetings were limited to 45 minutes. I
| was able to allow Jitsi to run as a web app on phones, but people
| complained that it ate through their batteries fast and caused
| them to get hot. They went back to meeting in person outdoors,
| and didn't need it. I turned it off after about a month, and
| haven't needed to look into it again.
|
| IRC + Jitsi could work for a lot of people, but there's still
| enough trust in big centralized platforms for people to be
| satisfied with them.
|
| https://github.com/ergochat/ergo
|
| https://github.com/kiwiirc/kiwiirc
|
| https://github.com/kiwiirc/plugin-conference
| asim wrote:
| It's not clear that regular people care about where software is
| hosted. If anything it's just far more convenient that you
| don't have to deal with anything. Did anyone care how secure
| zoom was? Not really. Just pure convenience.
| xekul wrote:
| Since the start of the pandemic I've been self-hosting a Jitsi
| instance on Linode for my hypnotherapy business -- partly to
| transmit high-bitrate audio, partly for privacy and partly for
| compatibility, since it works in most web browsers. It works well
| even internationally (over a broadband connection), to the point
| where I won't even consider commercial software for this use
| case.
| toxypol wrote:
| I do, ask me anything. It is great.
| ar-nelson wrote:
| Using the Jitsi website has worked well enough for me for years,
| and the calls are P2P as far as I'm aware. What's the advantage
| of hosting your own? Just preventing jitsi.org from seeing call
| metadata?
| benatkin wrote:
| That misses the whole point of this post. You may as well
| suggest using Zoom.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Zoom costs money beyond 40 mins, unlike Jitsi. It also
| doesn't require anyone to have an account, or to install any
| software. These are key differentiators in my book!
| benatkin wrote:
| Jitsi is footing the bill if you use the hosted product. If
| you don't want it to shut down or become expensive, you
| need to take a look at how the server is being run.
|
| With self-hosted, you're simply paying for the servers. If
| you can pay for the servers and maintain them, you can be
| confident they'll stay up.
|
| The hosted product is great, it just seems separate and off
| topic to me.
| jrm4 wrote:
| This is so wrong it hurts. Can't think of a better gap
| between theory and reality.
|
| (I.e., there is no universe in which Jitsi's possible/likely
| abuse of this data is remotely close to Zoom's)
| benatkin wrote:
| I'm thinking in on or off, yes or no, 1 or 0 here. The post
| is clearly about self hosting. So I'm not wrong at all :)
| Slippery_John wrote:
| I wonder if you could get more reliable performance by planning
| a more centralized location. My book club uses the main jitsi
| site and it works well all things considered, but it's not
| perfect by any means. We've got people in several US and EU
| time zones showing up with varying internet connection
| qualities, so it's a difficult case.
|
| But hey, it's free. And it hits the most important
| consideration: it could not be easier to use. That's pretty
| critical since my club mates don't have much capacity for
| troubleshooting.
| majkinetor wrote:
| Was running it for company but for some reason the code quality
| on share wasn't good (not sure if due to our installation).
| Switched to BBB (Big Blue Button) which has more options. I can
| highly recommend both.
| vkdelta wrote:
| Yes, I had hosted it on Digital ocean for a long time to bypass
| telco regimes where FaceTime and WhatsApp is blocked for A/V
| calls.
|
| It worked pretty well. I was scared of security issues where I
| thought some miscreants might have calls and I get blamed for it.
| There were security issues(which probably could be fixed but I
| didn't spend too much time)
|
| The problem was UX for mom and pop folks
| cwoolfe wrote:
| Besides privacy, what is the advantage of self-hosting when you
| can do meetings directly on https://meet.jit.si/ ?
| saghul wrote:
| Privacy is an important aspect.
|
| Authentication can be another important one, if you want to
| integrate with your existing SSO or other auth mechanism.
|
| Last, customization. While this can be done via JaaS too (our
| CPaaS offering) you will always have full control over your
| deployment if you self-host it.
| aborsy wrote:
| Aren't Zoom and Google meet end to end encrypted? Google
| might still track IPs finds out who talks to whom, but that's
| doable via any interaction.
| niyumard wrote:
| Well, I for one host my own Jitsi instance because of Internet
| censorship. The censorship is very bad here so major social
| media like WhatsApp and Telegram etc are blocked. And for cases
| such as Skype and Google Meet which aren't blocked the
| connection is sometimes throttled (not to mention that
| sometimes they just cut the Internet off) so that leaves one
| option: a self-hosted Jitsi instance on an Iranian data center.
|
| Fun fact: Even on an Iranian data center, I had to limit the
| video quality on my own server to 360p because other qualities
| don't work great either.
| gnicholas wrote:
| For my use case, I also use the hosted version. It's worked
| great, and as Zoom tightens the belt on meeting duration I am
| shifting more of my meetings to Jitsi. No one has ever
| complained, and I've asked folks for feedback to see how it
| compares to Zoom/Google. IME it's about the same as Zoom, and
| better than Google or Teams.
| foresto wrote:
| I'm looking forward to Element Call, which is currently in
| development.
|
| It looks like their design starts with WebRTC running through SFU
| (selective forwarding units), which is pretty common by itself,
| but they're adding a tree-like SFU hierarchy in order to handle
| many participants without requiring expensive MCU (multipoint
| control unit) servers.
|
| https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-...
|
| https://element.io/blog/element-call-beta-2-encryption-spati...
|
| Contrast with Jitsi, which requires Java, making it too heavy for
| my low power ARM server, and does end-to-end encryption in a way
| that's too heavy for some of my contacts' web browsers to run
| smoothly.
|
| In the meantime, I've been relying on my Mumble server when I
| don't need video. The sound quality is top notch, and the
| hardware requirements are low.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Yes. Setup is incredibly easy. It breaks without fail after a few
| upgrades, too.
|
| If you want to do it anyway: create a fully automated setup to
| quickly spin up a new instance.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Not just hosting, but even made a template:
| https://github.com/rcarmo/azure-ubuntu-jitsi (might need a minor
| update)
| Arccosyne wrote:
| Yep, I ran one on bare-metal for many years, then a Jitsi-Meet
| server as a 'replacement' while running the original for 1-on-1
| calls so the execs could use the full end-to-end crypto.
|
| Jitsi is great, IMO. Highly recommend.
|
| I've left the company since, I believe they were bought out and
| switched to MS Teams now.
| zaggynl wrote:
| Yes! jitsi.zaggy.nl
|
| For adhoc gaming sessions, family chat during corona.
|
| Disabled audio activity indicator(?) to severely reduce client
| CPU usage.
| aag wrote:
| I run a Jitsi instance on Linode. I used their push-button setup,
| then tweaked the security settings slightly. I keep it off and on
| a minimal instance except when it's time for a meeting, at which
| point I move it to a dedicated host for the duration of the
| meeting. I always check my TLS/SSL certificates and update the OS
| before the meeting, too. It has been okay, but not as reliable as
| Google Meet or Zoom. There's often someone having audio issues,
| typically on an iPad. Before I switched to a dedicated instance,
| those problems were worse. One of my regular meeting participants
| co-founded the FSF, so I'm using Jitsi so that we're using open-
| source software. I'm a big fan of Jitsi, but I want to be
| realistic about its reliability in my experience.
| saghul wrote:
| Can you elaborate on the reliability issues?
|
| Those on an iPad, were they using the app or the mobile web
| app?
| DANmode wrote:
| Is it just less resilient to bad connections, or is there
| something happening at a particular room capacity?
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| I was, but haven't for a year or so. It was handy during the
| COVID lockdown when I lived about 100 miles (three or so hours
| drive) from my mum and she wanted to see her grandson.
|
| Really the only reason I took it down was I moved my hosting to
| another server and never bothered to set it up.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| I've been hosting it for about 2 years, running in a container on
| a Proxmox host (a DL380G7 with 128GB RAM and a DS4243 JBOD in a
| tailor-made enclosure under the stairs here at the farm) together
| with a bunch of other services. It is not used all that often but
| when I need it it is there and works as intended. After
| configuring it I have not had to do anything else than run _apt
| update && apt dist-upgrade_ every now and then. It is a bit of a
| memory hog just like most other jvm-based services but it is
| reliable and dependable.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> It is a bit of a memory hog_
|
| Do you have a handle on how much of a memory hog? I've
| considered installing it for a small group of people (~15
| total, likely no more than 6 actively on a video call at any
| given time) but the dedicated server I'd put it on only has
| 32Gb in total (though it does run very little else that needs
| much memory: a large filesystem for backups, a web server
| hosting simple stuff, a LanguageTool self-install, occasionally
| other things I'm tinkering with that benefit from more
| bandwidth that the ~12mbit I currently get upstream hosting
| things at home).
| saghul wrote:
| That server should do just fine! The backend is mostly Java
| so it does use some RAM, but you can set limits and 32GB is
| enough anyway.
| api wrote:
| We did it for a long time but finally got pushed into Zoom due to
| edge case issues like distorted audio for some participants and
| the need to support really big meetings. We pretty much have to
| buy a Zoom subscription due to sales calls anyway, so we had it.
|
| In my experience Jitsi actually works better than Google Meet and
| I like self-hosting it, but Zoom works better than any and all
| WebRTC-based solutions.
|
| The hard thing for things like Jitsi is that they have to work in
| the browser and are therefore held prisoner by how good the
| browser is. Most of the issues we ran into are probably browser
| issues not Jitsi issues since we also have tons of problems with
| Google Meet.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| https://jitsi.org/about/
|
| > Jitsi is a set of open-source projects that allows you to
| easily build and deploy secure video conferencing solutions. At
| the heart of Jitsi are Jitsi Videobridge and Jitsi Meet, which
| let you have conferences on the internet, while other projects in
| the community enable other features such as audio, dial-in,
| recording, and simulcasting.
|
| Is it like self-hosted Zoom alternative? I feel like if an org is
| on Teams, they'll just use Teams video conference. Same for
| Slack. I used to work at an org that had Teams + Slack + Google
| Hangouts/Google Meet + Zoom.
| saghul wrote:
| Yep, you can think of it as a Google Meet / Zoom / Teams you
| can self-host.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Teams self host but without the chat functionality, right?
| osamagirl69 wrote:
| I run a matrix server deployed using their annsible script [1]
| which comes with jitsi, etherpad, etc.
|
| The setup was a bit of a hassle (need to get the domain
| configured for federation, updating the config files etc) but
| after a weekend of configuration it has been rock solid since (in
| operation for a year now). I use it primarily as a centralized
| chat client (using bridges to the various propriatary chat
| services) but it is nice to be able to throw up a quick jitsi
| call and/or etherpad document.
|
| The whole ansible/docker stuff is over my head, but these days I
| just run the playbook to apply updates and it hasn't failed me
| yet. Backups are handled by taking snapshots of the VM it runs
| in.
|
| The jitsi web client works great on desktop, but I would recomend
| using the dedicated mobile apps because I have heard reports the
| web client struggling on mobile.
|
| edit: forgot link [1] https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-
| docker-ansible-deploy
| joecool1029 wrote:
| This playbook is great, the maintainer also has a second one
| https://github.com/mother-of-all-self-hosting/mash-playbook
| that's compatible with it and also includes jitsi (as well as
| other non-matrix related roles).
| ashton314 wrote:
| That sounds awesome. What's the link you meant to share? (I see
| the `[1]` but no link.)
| hecanjog wrote:
| Since December I've been running a jitsi instance just for family
| and friends. It's been working well for me, and I like that I can
| just send a link to anyone and they can click it and join the
| call in a browser without messing around.
|
| Edit: since this in HN, I'll mention too that I don't even bother
| with passwords. I set up basic auth on the endpoint for
| management and room creation, and just leave the room(s) open.
| For a low key chat-with-friends-and-family setup, it's great and
| I haven't had to touch it since I set it up.
| chimineycricket wrote:
| Hosted at home? If so do you make everyone to use a VPN?
| rovr138 wrote:
| I host jitsi and other things at home, no VPN.
| hecanjog wrote:
| No, it's hosted on a hetzner server.
| vxNsr wrote:
| How much are you paying monthly for it, if you don't mind
| me asking.
| hecanjog wrote:
| It's about $40/month, but it's my personal server for
| everything else too. Hosts some web radio projects with
| liquidsoap and icecast, some generative audio
| experiments, and so on. It's still probably more server
| than I need.
|
| Edit: remembered that wrong. It's $66/month. But I'm
| using an instance much larger than you'd need to just run
| jitsi.
| zamalek wrote:
| You can get so much mileage from a $40 hetzner instance.
| Mine is doing all forms of useful things. My only
| critique is that latency to storage boxes is awful (and
| storage is otherwise really pricey).
| input_sh wrote:
| https://www.hetzner.com/sb
|
| You'll find plenty of decent ones here for ~EUR40/month.
| mikecoles wrote:
| Yes. Small instance for friends and family.
| parano1d wrote:
| Yes, in a commercial setting. It's somewhat complicated as a
| stack, but when everything plays together, it's low latency, good
| quality, flexible and scalable across regions.
|
| Only downside in my experience: cross device video never works?
| Good luck making a video call with chrome + firefox + android
| clients in the same room.
| saghul wrote:
| Cross device meetings should work without problems, sorry you
| ran into some!
|
| If you'd like to dig into it, please reach out to us on GH or
| to me at HNusername@jitsi.org
| bytefrost wrote:
| Setting is up is easy but the user experience is really bad :-(
| I'm on Google fiber and Google Meet works great and even MS Teams
| works fine. But whenever I use Jitsi either A) the call
| participants keep getting disabled/enabled or B) when video does
| come through my computer crumbles to its knees. Oh, and by the
| way, good luck using anything other than Google Chrome!
| epage wrote:
| Strange. I'm on jitsi a couple times a week (not self-hosted)
| and don't have these problems and am using Firefox.
| bytefrost wrote:
| At least for me the problems start when 15+ people join the
| call (about the size of a small classroom). I've tried both
| their hosted platform and self-hosting -\\_(tsu)_/-
| hgsgm wrote:
| Jitsi users: how many different conversation partners / fraction
| of your partners, use Jitsi with you?
| gnicholas wrote:
| I use the hosted version and tried it out after seeing it on HN
| a couple years ago. I have slowly increased my percentage use
| over the years, and now that Zoom is limiting 1-to-1 calls to
| 40 mins (used to be unlimited), I am moving over to Jitsi.
|
| Everyone I've talked with says it's easy to use, and
| connectivity has been just about as good as Zoom.
| saghul wrote:
| Hey there, Saul from the Jitsi team :-)
|
| Self-hosting is one of the use cases we spend a lot of time on,
| recently venturing into a hybrid model with JaaS components.
|
| If there is any pain point with self-hosting, please let us know!
| no_time wrote:
| Hi Saul,
|
| I attempted self hosting it on an RPI4 but the video quality
| was dropping heavily and stopping alltogether from time to
| time. I did not see an obvious bottleneck anywhere in the
| system. The rpi had both ram and cpu to spare, my connection is
| 1gbps down, 100mbps up. Should be more than enough for two
| people.
|
| This was early this year. I followed the official guide word-
| to-word. Others reported similar issues on the official forum
| so my issue isnt new or unique.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Just a guess, but was the rpi connected over wifi? IIRC the
| wifi isn't that great on the pi4.
| zzless wrote:
| Just wanted to say thanks as well. I host a private Jitsi
| server for my online teaching. It took a bit of effort to set
| up but worked well for me since.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I've set one up before when the pandemic was in full swing. I
| haven't really been stuck in group call hell for well over a
| year with my work now but at the time I was really impressed
| about how much higher the video and audio quality was over what
| zoom had at the time.
|
| The only complaint we had was the mobile performance. Made
| older phones hot and killed the battery fast.
|
| Other than that great software suite!
| PuffinBlue wrote:
| A serious pain point is that Jitsi stopped supporting Ubuntu
| 18.04 with no warning, well before its EoL date.
|
| An update led to a dependency issue (I would have to go remind
| myself which but I think Prosody) and that was that - just a
| 'well lets stop supporting Ubuntu 18.04 then'.
|
| I think over time the advice has been to go manually downgrade
| some packages or try and find the relevant versions somewhere.
| A more satisfactory solution would be to support the up to date
| versions of dependencies available to the distribution jitsi is
| installed on.
|
| We're getting to the point where this doesn't matter of course,
| as 18.04 goes end of life. But you can understand why we are
| reluctant to recommend jitsi as a stable and reliably
| maintained option after this experience.
| rosmax_1337 wrote:
| Hey, I'm part of a team that self hosts a jitsi instance. I've
| made a small plugin that uses some CSS-hacks to make the
| buttons in the bottom of the call also have text, and not just
| icons. It makes it much easier to explain to someone which
| button you need to press to access the chat, or begin to screen
| share.
|
| Instead of sharing the ugly CSS-hacks here's just the list of
| what I've named the buttons, the CSS-hack isn't something I
| would expect to make it upstream so to say.
|
| From left to right: - Mic - Webcam
| - Screen share - Chat - Hey! (it's willingly
| ambiguous so that someone might stumble upon the feature in a
| exploratory manner, we don't really use the "raise hand"
| function in a serious way) - This call - Layout
| - More actions - Leave
|
| And lastly, thanks for making great software.
| myself248 wrote:
| THANK YOU
|
| "then press the three-lines" makes me feel debased as a human
| being, like I'm reduced to pictograms because language has
| been taken from me.
|
| That this isn't a standard part of every software, is part of
| what's gone wrong with UI/UX in the last decade or so.
| meatmanek wrote:
| Public documentation on how to automatically install +
| configure the Debian packages would be great (i.e. using
| debconf-set-selections). I've figured it out from forum posts,
| etc. in the past, but it keeps changing, causing my
| installation scripts to get stuck waiting for user input.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| Hey! I just want to let you know that Jitsi is a fantastic
| project and it's almost entirely replaced any proprietary
| services I used previously.
|
| Thank you for your hard work!
| saghul wrote:
| Thank you!
| dsr_ wrote:
| Yes, and it's pretty easy if you're using Debian and you don't
| connect it to a VOIP phone service.
| Neil44 wrote:
| No but my networking group does, which I thought was an
| interesting choice. It was because the whole 'zoom is insecure'
| thing was going around when the pandemic hit. It's worked out OK
| ish, they're still using it after 3+ years.
| tomrod wrote:
| I've considered setting one up for my small business, but I've
| not been able to commit to the learning curve quite yet.
| BjornW wrote:
| Yes, I ran & still run a Jitsi instance and a website which would
| connect you to one of 12 participating Jitsi server at random
| applying to our guidelines in the EU.
|
| My goal was offering a low-barrier open for all way to connect
| with loved ones. During the peak of the Covid pandemic for many
| people it was easier to connect with colleagues than family
| members or friends. So I contacted a few sysadmins and public
| organizations of whom I knew were running Jitsi and asked if it
| could be shared via our public website. A few agreed and a few
| dropped by and wanted to help out. After a few days a commercial
| hosting company decided to sponsor us with one VPS as well.
|
| Our idea was to connect the servers and use the API to select a
| server with the lowest load. In the meantime we used a
| randomizer...we've never used the API after all, the randomizer
| worked well enough ;)
|
| People told us they've used our free service for yoga classes,
| library book reading clubs, hackerspaces & celebrating birthdays
| with grandma.
|
| Overall I'm still very proud what we've achieved in a few days
| with some servers, opensource software and bit of work.
|
| Many thanks to @saghul, 8x8 and all other people contributing to
| Jitsi. Thank you!
| natebc wrote:
| This sounds brilliant. Very good thing to have achieved and you
| certainly should be proud for pulling something like that
| together.
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