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Comment by AlecSchueler | Hacker News Reader

Hooray for centralisation of infrastructure!

Not the best example as there's likely a dozen service someone could switch to. People choose Zoom mostly because they like it, not by lack of choice.

well there should be more competitors I actually like.

Businesses aren’t willing to pay, and thus they don’t exist.

They aren't? Every company I've worked at pays through the nose for one of GTM/Zoom/BlueJeans/Lifesize/Chime. Zoom is definitely the least bad of them in my experience, not that I like it at all. Lack of customers willing to pay doesn't seem to have stopped there from being a bounty of terrible alternatives.

It's the host that chooses the platform, participants don't get to choose.

I thought WebRTC solved some of these problems, but seems like peer discovery would still need to be centralised in some way. Are there any protocols that would solve this? (excluding email or blockchain both of which would require additional extensions or standards to create a solution with smooth UX)

Unfortunately WebRTC provides only part of the features needed to build Web Conferencing app. The main issue is that p2p connections don't work for more 5 attendees in the same session. After that is better to have MCU or SFU.

Other features like recording a much more reliable if they are implemented server side.

isnt it funny how we love decentralization in the cloud but that really just consolidates our resources to 3 main companies?

like, yes I get it multi regions makes you safer, but given vendor lock if aws fucks up across the board with a bug, we all fuck up across the board.

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