Jitsi open source video chat

So my university has shutdown the campus for the remainder of the semester due to Coronavirus concerns and asked all students to attend classes remotely (mainly using Zoom for live-streaming lectures). I went looking for an open source cross platform video conferencing solution with a fast onboarding process to keep in touch with fellow students and found Jitsi to fit the bill.

It’s free, it’s FOSS, and there are no accounts required to create a chat session on their website. You just need to enter a name for your room, and they give you a link to share for people to join.

The only officially supported web browser is Google Chrome which kinda sucks. But it seems to work okay in Firefox except I couldn’t get it to detect any of my microphones (your usage may vary). Instead, I’m using it in Falkon and it works flawlessly.

Unfortunately, it also doesn’t appear that video chats are end-to-end encrypted which means whoever runs the server can see the raw footage (but you can self-host).

Overall it’s good enough and it looks like the public service is hosted by 8×8, which is a public VoIP company, so I’m not overly concerned about eavesdropping (due to the lack of end-to-end encryption). I’ll keep an eye out for better options but for now I’m sticking with Jitsi.