Today is day 16 of my 29 Days of Open Source Alternatives series, where I'll be exploring open source alternatives to proprietary software in the categories of Game Development and Multimedia, Development Tools and Platforms, Productivity and Collaboration Tools, and more. If you'd like to see the list of the open source alternatives I'll be covering this month, head over to my 29 Days of Open Source Alts Page or if you want more open source to learn-to-code programs, check out this list. This is post is in the Productivity & Collaboration Category.
Recently, I gave a virtual talk, Essential Skills for Open Source Contributors: Beyond Code, at the Creative Freedom Summit 2024. I've given quite a few virtual talks, and I'm familiar with Streamyard, CrowdCast, Zoom, and probably a couple of others, but this time, we were using Jitsi Meet. I'm not going to lie, I always get a little nervous using a new service for a virtual talk, because I'm not sure what to expect. And from a speaker's perspective, I found it to fulfill all my expectations. As a person who leads weekly virtual meetups, I wanted to know a little more about Jitsi Meet and the contributors behind it.
Jitsi Meet - Secure, Simple and Scalable Video Conferences that you use as a standalone app or embed in your web application.
Get ready, because I'm going to take you down my rabbit hole.
Jitsi Meet - Features
For the conference, they sent us a link to join and more information in the Jitsi handbook. But if you check out their site, you can also start your own meeting without an account.
If you want to book a meeting URL in advance, then you can join with Google, Facebook, or GitHub.
I was actually pretty impressed with the features they offer and how simple it was to use. As a moderator, here are some features you have access to:
For participants, you have access to backgrounds, screensharing, chat, emojis and gifs, the handraise function (which is an important feature for me), participants list, and one that's really interesting, Participants Stats that let you know the total speaker time of each speaker, and more.
Overall, the experience was simple, and I mean that in the best way. It didn't take me long to get started, the UI was intuitive, and I didn't have to give them my credit card.
So then I started wondering, "Why haven't I heard about this before? What does the Jitsi Community look like?" And that's how I ended up checking out their GitHub.
jitsi
/
jitsi-meet
Jitsi Meet - Secure, Simple and Scalable Video Conferences that you use as a standalone app or embed in your web application.
Jitsi Meet
Jitsi Meet is a set of Open Source projects which empower users to use and deploy video conferencing platforms with state-of-the-art video quality and features.
Amongst others here are the main features Jitsi Meet offers:
- Support for all current browsers
- Mobile applications
- Web and native SDKs for integration
- HD audio and video
- Content sharing
- Raise hand and reactions
- Chat with private conversations
- Polls
- Virtual backgrounds
And many more!
Using Jitsi Meet
Using Jitsi Meet is straightforward, as it's browser based. Head over to meet.jit.si and give it a try. It's scalable and free to use. All you need is a Google, Facebook or GitHub account in order to start a meeting. All browsers are supported!
Using mobile? No problem, you can either use your mobile web browser or our fully-featured mobile apps:
| Android | Android (F-Droid) | iOS |
|---|---|---|
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If you are feeling adventurous and want to get an early scoop…
Open Source Stats
- 🌠 21.1k
- 👀 510
- Forks: 6.4k
- License: Apache-2.0
- Commits: 12,104
- Contributors: 456
They have a pretty great stars to forks ratio, and their contributors over the last 30 days are consistent.
I decided to go a little further down the rabbit hole and compare jitsi-meet with the other active repositories in the Jitsi org.
Jitsi-Meet
Overall, the Jitsi Meet repo shows consistency in everything but issue velocity. Scrolling through the issues, I saw that nearly all of them have/had a comments thread going, so it seems that communication is/was happening.
I decided to zoom out and look at the other repositories to give me a better sense of the community of contributors.
Jitsi Org repos
You can see here that Jitsi Meet is the most active repository, both by the activity level and the number of contributors. We do see an improvement in the Issue velocity, and they continue to maintain a really great stars-to-forks ratio.
Contributors
We're down to the last part of the rabbit hole: contributors. I created a list of contributors using the Insights page for all the active repos.
It's no surprise that the most contributions are to Jitsi Meet. We do see 27.4% of the contributions coming from @waja, but if we look a little bit closer, we see the majority of that activity is coming from commits, so there is nothing I would worry about in terms of bus factor.
Takeaways
Well, we've found our way out of that rabbit hole. Jitsi is definitely an alternative to the platforms I mentioned above. I really loved how easy it was to get started, and the contributor community seems to be well-established and consistent. If you're looking for an open source and secure way to host you're meetings, you might be interested in Jitsi!
Have you used it? If you want to test it out together to chat all things open source, let me know in the comments.
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