this! i hate on zoom how it only focuses on people on camera.

in fact the only thing i hate is how horrible it runs in the browser in firefox :/

I can’t even get my InfoSec team to let us use all the features we already pay for in our M365 E5 license because they can’t figure out how to secure and govern it. Unfortunately nowadays bringing up great ideas that are open source to replace mediocre big tech products mostly gets laughed out of the room 😢

This is the way.

This is awesome. But I'm a little suspicious. How is it completely free? Seems like video conferencing would use a lot of resources

Zoom is so much better. Teams doesn't even identify which screen pre-share. Oh you want to annotate or highlighter point? Install a plugin but only if you're the organizer or allowed by the sharing party, and only if you're using the native app.

Teams is not satisfactory for work

Jitsi is one part of the solution. You need to integrate it into a messenger like matrix + element, and a dial in system / SIP trunk for rough parity. It's a little resource intensive to self host but well worth doing nonetheless.

Nope. Not safe for work! Pass the word! We need to form a coalition.

But the most important thing is that it was done ✅. Right?

I'd like to politely disagree

Finding alternatives to large software packages is great, don't think I'm not saying that - but any time you have competitor X and competitor Y, be they both commercial, both F/OSS, or some combination thereof, the competitors must be cognizant of each other when setting up features.

Burying your head in the sand and ignoring Microsoft, Apple, and Google is a very solidly Microsoft-Apple-Google-style play. It's the play of someone who believes the other side offers no competition. That's how you get unwieldy features these tech giants implement because they know they can make a 70% effort and people won't be annoyed enough to leave.

Every tool they make has a reason someone made it. Many tools are very important - for one example, the Microsoft Office document format is considered to be almost a universal format in presentations, spreadsheets, and plain documents for message passing between businesses.

But as we as a society design alternatives to those various monopolies (as we should), we need users to want to use the new thing. We have to take what people like and keeps them on their old platform, and best preserve the intent of what they want on the new platform. Doing so requires discussing the features those big tech companies

And as users, when we select the platforms we use, we need to weigh the cost of going with an alternative vs going with a giant. No solution is a perfect solution for everyone, and the chooser needs to weigh the maintenance cost (in hours or money) they will incur, how their users will like/dislike it, and maybe even look at a piece of software and decide "nah the vibes are off".

I'd love a world where those three tech giants had proper competition in all fields, and I think their business practices are scummy and need improvement. But the real alternatives to each need some polish before they're ready to be used by [arbitrary tech illiterate grandmother].

I agree, it must continue.