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Comment by Mistri | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to miss Hangouts. Anyone have any good alternatives for free and anonymous browser-based video calling?

For context, I use a permanent Google Hangouts link under my account and made a subdomain of my domain redirect to it (http://partytime.jmistri.com). Whenever I want to talk to someone or have an informal group call, I can tell them to "hop on partytime". It doesn't require an account and it's a great high-quality video call on-the-go.

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https://meet.jit.si/

Never heard of this before, but it looks awesome! Do you know if rooms expire after a certain amount of time? If so I might install it on my server and have a forever running meeting.

No expiration for anything in my experience. It's all OSS, so it would surprise me if there are any awkward restrictions.

https://appear.in/

While it's not bad, it has many features that are paid-only and the UI isn't perfect... but I suppose I was spoiled by Hangouts. Thanks for the tip.

The main reason I still use Google Meet is that appear.in has a full-fat P2P model where your video and audio must stream to every user and vice versa. Even with 4 people that can get pretty taxing on a poor connection.

Google does smarter muxing of video and audio streams and is better about throttling video quality to preserve bandwidth when required.

I've liked using that in the past. They seem to require a login now.

Oh no! Used to be my favorite

Looks like you need a login to create a room, but not to join one.

Someone at some point in the past has created this one, for example:

https://appear.in/lolbutts

And you can join it as a guest.

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