During the pandemic, I stood up a Jitsi server on Linode and we ditched Zoom for our weekly family get-together calls. Sometimes the audio was not quite as good as Zoom.

If you set up SSL with LetsEncrypt, your call is encrypted “in flight”, but is apparently unencrypted for some portion of its travel through your server.

If it’s a one-on-one call, the two parties are connected directly and skips the server.

I haven’t used it in a while, but end to end encryption was still experimental a couple years ago. It didn’t work on all devices. Something to look at.

Jitsi Server works pretty well on a $5/mo Linode Nanode, so it’s worth trying. Especially if you get their $100 credit on sign up, you can try hosting it for free for a couple months. It’s available as one of their Marketplace apps, so it’s easy to set up.

That sounds like a commercial. I’m not affiliated with Linode, except for being a satisfied customer.

I have hosted Jitsi publicly for my organisation for a bit and all the while I was hosting it, there was not much difference between it and the one hosted by Jitsi. Sometimes the add-ons like etherpad etc are a bit of a hassle to configure. Sometimes these features offered by the online service are an iteration or two ahead since the folks at Jitsi are actively developing it and have access to alpha/beta builds that are a trouble to implement locally.

Since you are already considering the privacy concerns, there is nothing much remaining. Maybe uptime concerns if third parties are going to use your service too and will shout at you if they can't access your service.

I also dabbled with hosting it through OpenFire which gives you more granular control over scheduling the meetings. Maybe you could explore that too.

Overall it is a fun thing and you feel fully in control.

I HATE ZOOM I HATE MEET I HATE TEAMS I HATE ZOOM I HATE MEET I HATE TEAMS I HATE ZOOM I HATE MEET I HATE TEAMS

I just reject their Zoom/Meet/Teams link and sending them my self-hosted link. I love Jitsi.

I love jitsi,as a concept. Before the pandemic i tried to schedule video calls on jitsi. Unfortunately it required more tech savvyness from people to get everything connected and working, and we ended up using other services.

I would love to go back to jitsi. Im hoping getting connected, and the call quality are better now. Id really like to see jitsi be the top choice for video calling ...

Everyone on a call in the meet.jit.si instance is made a moderator, so if you want to be able to control that you have to self host. Other than that if reliability isn't a concern (not that I've ever seen that instance bogged down too bad) then you may as well use it. You can always host your own later on anyway.

The Foundry VTT community frequently uses video conferencing for tabletop roleplaying games and initially Jitsi was the recommended self-hosted video option, but the community has since moved on and now recommends https://livekit.io/. I didn't set up either and don't have deep insights into what drove the shift, but it's an interesting data point around a community that tried both shifting focus away from Jitsi.

Hi,

I have also been thinking about selfhoating a jisti-meet server. Just how easy / difficult is it to selfhost it? Do you run it in docker or natively? Linux or some other OS (FreeBSD)?

Kr.

Guaranteed bandwith and extra features like recording and streaming.