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Jitsi, the open-source video conferencing platform, now requires a Google, Microsoft, or Facebook account for their online service (jitsi.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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While Jitsi is open-source, most people use the platform they provide, meet.jit.si, for immediate conference calls. They have now introduced a "Know Your Customer" policy and require at least one of the attendees to log in with a Facebook, Github (Microsoft), or Google account.

One option to avoid this is to self-host, but then you'll be identifiable via your domain and have to maintain a server.

As a true alternative to Jitsi, there's jami.net. It is a decentralized conference app, free open-source, and account creation is optional. It's available for all major platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android), including on F-Droid.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That said, it is completely understandable that some users may feel uncomfortable using an account to access the service. For such cases we strongly recommend hosting your own deployment of Jitsi Meet. We spend a lot of effort to keep that a very simple process and this has always been the mode of use that gives people the highest degree of privacy.

Seems like you can avoid it by self-hosting. Still a very suspicious move, kinda defeats the whole point of an alternative to big tech conference services.

Google, GitHub and Facebook for starters but may modify the list later on

Maybe they could support some auth provider from some fediverse app? That would be kinda neat.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Earlier this year we saw an increase in the number of reports we received about some people using our service in ways that we cannot tolerate. To be more clear, this was not about some people merely saying things that others disliked.

Over the past several months we tried multiple strategies in order to end the violations of our terms of service. However in the end, we determined that requiring authentication was a necessary step to continue operating meet.jit.si.

This sounds to me like a pattern of people using it for actual serious crimes (with the obvious guess being video sharing of sex crimes/trafficking/kids). I understand that that justification is used for a lot of extremely invasive privacy violations, and stuff like scanning every file in the name of that is too far, IMO, but if you're the only platform with resources to handle that traffic that allows anonymity, it's very likely to grow at a significantly larger rate than the rest of your traffic.

You can't (shouldn't) scan every file every individual sends to every other individual in order to prevent it, but once you have a platform that's capable of supporting community-type activity, it's a very real issue that you can face.

"You can host yourself with your own choices on vetting participation because here are the tools to do it" isn't really a bad line to draw. But you can't have your servers be a central point for that.