JITSI MEET
Set up, secure, and self-host your way to video-conferencing nirvana, and you’ll never have to use Zoom again
JITSI MEET IS A FREE, open-source video-conferencing program that you can connect to via a browser or smartphone app. You can use it by visiting https://meet. jit.si and choosing a name for your virtual meeting (or accepting one of the amusing ones the website generates). There’s no downloads or configuration required by clients, they just need to click a link that you can share by email from within the meeting room, or dial in and connect with a PIN. Simple.
Obviously Jitsi’s free service has some limitations, but these will be gone when you self-host your own Jitsi installation. You don’t need any particularly special hardware to do this, and thanks to the excellent Debian and Ubuntu packaging, there’s not much in the way of configuration at all. You will need a domain name though; a free one from a dynamic DNS service, such as DuckDNS or DynDNS, will work.
As you can imagine (and we’ll look at this in a moment if you can’t), under the hood Jitsi is a rather complicated affair. Not only does it have to wrangle the vagaries of streaming through NAT gateways (such as home routers), it also needs to keep all this secure with SSL, so if you cheat and use a self-signed certificate, your users will see scary warnings.