Jitsi Meet: An open source alternative to Zoom

I'm curious... between Whereby and Jitsi and I assume other browser-based video solutions relying on WebRTC...

...how big is the barrier these days to building a "videoconferencing platform" supporting millions of people... that runs on a single server?

Because if you need to do is build a pretty website that essentially just keeps track of meeting names and the names and IP addresses of participants...

...while each client is P2P-streaming their full-res videostream while speaking or other participants have them pinned... and every other client is P2P-streaming a low-res videostream to power the thumbnails (and similar decisions about which computer is the main audio source and when, or picking a single peer to serve as the audio mixer)...

What else is there to do, really?

(I mean obviously there's fancy stuff you can add like screensharing, chat, authentication, etc... and browser-specific bugfixes and quirks presumably...)

But are we at a point where anyone can write a functional videoconferencing platform in a week, and platforms are differentiating mainly on nicer UX and extra features?

Or is there something huge I'm missing here, where implementing WebRTC is somehow a lot harder than it seems, and/or still requires server farms to route the streams through in certain cases?

The main reasons for Zooms popularity (and in general the most important features of a videoconferencing software) are accessibility and reliability.

Same as with Slack/IRC - privacy is not the most important features in that space. If I have the choice of a working solution with some minor privacy issues and a solution which will never be adopted b/c half of the people will not be able to join or their experience is miserable, I will gladly take the former (except for the most delicate conversations maybe).

(And I am someone who takes privacy serious in most cases...)

I normally complain about terrible open source branding but didn't have a negative reaction to this branding when I saw this post.

Goes to show how important it is to do user research on a broad swath of the population to make sure you have branding that isn't off-putting to a significant subset of people.

It doesn't scale well beyond a handful of people. You need *N bandwidth to send and receive, and without a thing called 'simulcast' (creating multiple, different quality stream simultaneously) which doesn't have good browser support the quality is defined by the lowest common denominator. A central server solves many, many issues that result in better quality.

Jitsi itself barely works on Firefox and not at all on mobile devices (without their app).

> Hangouts (now Meet)

Ah-ha! Google Hangouts Meet is indeed the GSuite video conferencing solution, complemented by Google Hangouts Chat, the GSuite Slack competitor. Google Hangouts is "deprecated" but still alive, and with a plain-old gmail account I don't see an option to use Hangouts Chat nor Hangouts Meet, only Hangouts. As a user in a GSuite org, Chat and Meet exist, and plain-old Hangouts text messages are mirrored in Chat, but the video conferencing is still weirdly separate from Meet.