The Jami conferencing system | Hacker News Reader

The Jami conferencing system

jami.net

81 pointszaik30 comments

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Jami doesn't need a web browser, and doesn't need someone to set up a server, AFAIK.

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.

MS Teams is the best way. Worth the dollars.

MS Teams has a free version now.

Free as in free beer. There is a difference.

Yes, it works well enough; but it's sometimes a pain, but not enough to move away

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.

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.

This is 100% trolling, right? Teams is so painfully slow and inefficient compared to almost everything out there.

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.

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.

I’m convinced that a lot of the problems with Teams is your installation and the servers behind the system.

Teams was widely used at Whole Foods when I was there (I left in August of 2021), and that’s not a small company. And it worked very well. Better than any other chat/video conferencing solution I had seen to that date.

Now that I’m working at AWS, I’ve used Slack more extensively, and I’m still not convinced that it’s a better chat client. Maybe. Maybe not.

Internally, Amazon and AWS primarily use Chime for videoconferencing, and it’s getting better. I think Teams is still a lot better in that role, but Chime is catching up.

I have hated on Microsoft since at least 1984, if not before. And I dearly loved the early days of Skype. But even I must grudgingly admit that Teams is not a horribly bad solution in these spaces. Less bad than most others I’ve seen.

Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and my own personal experiences, not for my employer or any previous employer.

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.

Have they fixed the problem where if you have only a few participants, and one is on a connection that is I a separate region from the others, that participant will show the symptoms of the queue they are on being stuffed instead of flushed, and e.g have audio and video freezes that never catch up, and not be able to see screen shares even when video is off?

This was an issue for much of last year. In larger calls this didn't happen, but it made teams a painful waste of time and energy for actual team communication, rather than big announcements. Hangouts/meet and zoom both work fine in the situations I'm thinking of.

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.

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.

There is two level of muted. local mute and moderator mute. If somebody is muted locally it can't be unmuted

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.

there is a label shown and a red icon on the participant with the mic crossed

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.

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.

Thats a great feature and something I've wished for constantly as someone who often moderates zoom meetings

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.

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.

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.

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