Jitsi’s Emil Ivov on scaling up during a pandemic | Hacker News Reader

Jitsi’s Emil Ivov on scaling up during a pandemic

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“I would say that we started this project very much with a technology mindset and focus on technical problems,” Ivov told The Daily Swig. “If I were to start over again, I would worry significantly more about use cases and about how real people could use the technology.”

This was buried at the end yet is arguably the most interesting part, worthy of its own article. Scaling up cause you used a cloud infrastructure is old news. Details on product vs engineering lessons is timeless.

Every technology faces that problem - you get a huge influx of users and the numbers say you have to start making it possible for non-technical and inexperienced users.

The problem is usually that when software nowadays gets popular, business people get involved and start messing with the secret sauce that is responsible for the popularity.

The sentiment behind his words seems to be "I could have been zoom", and that kind of thinking may lead him to think he should compromise the core values (that are driving people from zoom to jitsi in the first place).

There’s going to be a large number of video conferencing apps and startups over the next few years as we settle in with distance learning and remote work. Zoom and meet are the bare minimum but not optimal.

There's a chapter on Jitsi by Emil Ivov[0] in "The Architecture of Open Source Applications" book.

[0]: http://aosabook.org/en/jitsi.html

Note that this is the Jitsi desktop app, which is not the same as Jitsi Meet (the web-based videoconferencing site that people are more likely to use today).

Anyone ever get jitsi to stay connected? We use Google meet daily but it's still half baked, we actually liked jitsi but could never keep it from dropping

I’ve tried it for calls with a few people and didn’t have a lot of connection related issues. If you’re able to, you could self-host a Jitsi Meet instance at any cloud service provider with a geographically closer presence to you. I’ve been thinking of doing that but haven’t tried it yet.

Jitsi Meet does eat up phone/tablet batteries a lot and also causes a lot of heating. I guess it could still be optimized further to handle these better (improvements to the client and platform have been pushed all these months too).

I have it running on a 1cpu 1gb Ubuntu vps add can hold twenty or so people (audio only) at 15-40% cpu. (We're audio only because not everyone has good internet connections, and makes things run smoother). It's stable as a rock. Very impressed. The odd person will turn on video for no appreciable deficit to the rest, or the server.

I tried Jitsi Meet in a conference call of forty people and we all switched to Google Meet because it was so unreliable and broken. This might have to do with compute limits on the server side (Kubernetes auto scaling?) but it didn’t work.

I use MS Teams wherever possible because it just works and most group calls I am on are in a business context anyways so the other integrations are pretty useful

I’m pretty sure all video conferencing tools cause a phone to heat up and lose battery: the camera, screen and radios are all constantly active

self hosting Jitsi is pretty easy. They have a whole bunch of scripts that does everything for you.

I run a self hosted Jitsi instance for my student Club. We are using for meetings with up to 50 people in a weekly basis. Works pretty well. Everyone accept the speakers has to turn Video off at that scale. With Video it works reliable up to 15 people.

There are some tweaks regarding framerate and resolution but that only raises the limit slightly.

Videoconferencing

If you don't mind me asking, what sort of hardware and network did you use for self-hosting? I tested it out with a couple of people on a basic Digital Ocean droplet and it was spotty (quality dropped really quickly) and it convinced me not to bother persuading my family/friends to switch over for our calls

There's a useful thread of people reporting different server/users combinations that worked for them here: https://community.jitsi.org/t/recommended-server-specs-for-2...

Thanks

I use it for small Javascript meetups (15-45 people) and it works well for us. If the broadcaster has slow internet it pixelates badly though. This is using the free service they offer.

On our corporate network it always worked better than the official solutions Skype for Business (Lync) and WebEx. Sadly policy does not encourage/officially allow using it.

Jitsi currently struggles on Firefox. Works much smoother if you use Chromium (or Brave or something).

The only current issue I'm aware of is a regression in FF 80, which breaks screensharing, if participants are audio-only: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1663286

Just done jitsi on firefox on debian stable. At the end of a 2 hour session I got about 1 second of lag. No idea yet how I should even troubleshoot it, probably just going to chrome and see if it is better.

Brave recently released Together, which uses Jitsi. Wish we could see a bigger push towards staying off Zoom and Meet. Seems like Jitsi, Together and others can provide solid alternates to Zoom - just a matter of getting users to care enough to switch.

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