Whats a good conference tool that doesn't spy on you?

Discuss The Products
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Currently there is a high demand for online conference tools, but a low supply of tools that don’t spy on you.

What I want:

  • free server (no GAFAM or Cloudflare), free software, no tracking
  • voice conference - video not necessary
  • presentation sharing would be nice, but not necessary
  • should work flawlessly
  • either free or cheap, but you should be able to test it for free first

Do you have any positive experience with Jitsi, Mumble, Jami or whatever?

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Hi,
I Have used https://framatalk.org/, which uses Jitsi meet. It worked well. One of my partners had issues, but none of the others had, so I wonder if it was related to the computer they used.

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I heard nextcloud/talk should be good

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Mumble is voice chat software, not a conference tool. I guess you can use it for such. It works pretty well, if you select the right codecs, though people use self-signed certificates which adds a bit of snake oil.

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Next to the previously mentioned I also know of:
Jami https://jami.net/
Tox https://tox.chat/
Jitsi https://jitsi.org/

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I’ve used Jitsi Meet multiple times and it works quite well :slight_smile:
Moreover, you don’t have to register an account or download software, it just works in your browser :blush:

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+1 for jitsi meet, which is the server used by framatalk (cited earlier).
There’s an app on f-droid, makes it really convenient to use!

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Okay so by now I got the chance to test framatalk with a few people - which is the only jitsi instance I know of so far that doesn’t have Google Spyware or other no-gos.
We were 4 people and all had our videos off and it worked really well.
On Tuesday there is a call scheduled with Mumble - apparently someone has their own instance which we can use - I hope it’s not running on a cloudflare server or similar…
I definitely want to test Jami too.

nextcloud.com/talk/ is full of Youtube and Twitter trackers, which doesn’t look promising.

Tox I’ll still have to look into.

Thanks everybody for the tips so far. I hope I can get some of my peeps to move away from Zoom, so I’m not always excluded.

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Yeah, I guess this is only interesting on a self hosted instance (as nextcloud is a commercial entity)

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I’d like to try a self hosted instance of https://rocket.chat/
I’ll do some test during this week.

I’ve never tried the cloud version.

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I stumbled by random over this. Don’t know it, so cannot say anything about it. Maybe worth a read or try.

Another search by someone I came across.

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More, I have tried a self hosted version of https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton at university.
Very very good.

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Which app do you mean?

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jitsi meet, was in the line above the one you quoted

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Yeah, but there is no app like that in the F-Droid repo.

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It’s here: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.jitsi.meet/

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:woman_facepalming: For some reason I can’t find the app in the F-Droid client, but I already have downloaded the app. :wink:

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We had another call and it didn’t work well anymore. Probably because of too high demand.

Didn’t happen over Mumble. Don’t know why yet.

Doesn’t work well yet.

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I tried to use Framapad today and I saw a message. Here is the one for Framatalk:

26
262234×688 111 KB

I didn’t even try it because I didn’t want to overload their servers.

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Hi Paula!
My brother just suggested installing zoom so that my mother can see her grandchildren, and I remembered you had written you would rather not use it. Can you (briefly) explain why? Can you recommend any of the alternatives you tested? We need something that works with video and is very, very user friendly (easy enough to use for an 80-year-old in confinement…)
Thanks!
Linda

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