Working through the suggested alternatives to Zoom, starting with #Jitsi - but it appears to want me to login using Facebook (hahahahaha), Google (hahahahahahahahahahaha) or GitHub. Now, the latter I can do. But I've heard rumblings about that site too.
Why would anyone offering an alternative to Zoom suggest these as the only login methods?
Charlie Stross
in reply to Janeishly • • •Janeishly
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Charlie Stross
in reply to Janeishly • • •Janeishly
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •@cstross I think you're absolutely right to predict dire things. I'm not an Apple user, but if I was I'd definitely not be putting any more money their way.
The only (1) good thing about all the stuff currently going on in the US is that it's made (some) people think a lot more carefully about where their loyalties need to be. And that isn't with megacorporations treating them as so much plankton to be scooped up and digested.
Charlie Stross
in reply to Janeishly • • •What I really, really, want is to locate an EU-based manufacturer equivalent to Framework: modular, repairable laptops and desktops that run open source OSs with design chops approaching where Apple was a decade ago.
Alas, there's nothing like that on the horizon.
Janeishly
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Charlie Stross
in reply to Janeishly • • •Janeishly
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Charlie Stross
in reply to Janeishly • • •Contact Us
FrameworkJaneishly
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •sbi
in reply to Janeishly • • •@cstross One of my sons bought his Linux laptop here: tuxedocomputers.com/en/Imprint… He seems rather happy about it.
FWIW, when our family used Jitsi for virtual get-togethers during the pandemic, nobody had an account. This might be different now. (Note that there are different providers, pretty much alike to mastodon.social not being the only Mastodon provider.)
Imprint - TUXEDO Computers
www.tuxedocomputers.comCharlie Stross
in reply to sbi • • •Janeishly
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •sbi
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •No, they weren't tailored for Windows, but for Linux. (Yes, hardware vendors always also provide Windows drivers, but TTBOMK that's even true for Macs, so it can't be the argument here.)
They solve the biggest problem you have installing Linux on your PC: Will it have all the drivers, and in what quality? Sounds good to me.
Charlie Stross
in reply to sbi • • •@sbi I say "Windows PCs" because the PC monicker is hopelessly vague these days (Android? Chromebook? Windows? Build-your-own?) and Microsoft is still pushing machines with their malware preinstalled.
Problem is, vanishingly few Windows-ecosystem vendors have any sense of aesthetics, and as for the Linux world? Hollow laughter.
It's like if I'm buying furniture for my home why would I want to use exclusively beige office chairs?
Janeishly
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •sbi
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •ICBWT.
Charlie Stross
in reply to sbi • • •sbi
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •rob
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Claudius Link
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •What is with @tuxedocomputers ?
I don't think they are as modular as framework but provided many options still
tuxedocomputers.com/
Ok i see, it was already mentioned
wandering.shop/@cstross/114256…
TUXEDO Computers
www.tuxedocomputers.comCharlie Stross
2025-03-31 08:58:36
🔏 Matthias Wiesmann
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •But there is also a huge opportunity, I would say the need for privacy is growing in the western word, in particular for liberal professions.
They should probably buy Threema…
Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Janeishly • •Janeishly likes this.
Alexandre Oliva
in reply to Janeishly • • •Janeishly
in reply to Alexandre Oliva • • •Alexandre Oliva
in reply to Janeishly • • •which part of this process seems nonstraightforward or even unfamiliar to you?
* installing the program, from jami.net or appstores or whatever
* creating an identifier when prompted
* establishing contact with other parties
* creating groups
* inviting contacts to groups
* starting a group call
Jami
JamiElena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Alexandre Oliva • •@Alexandre Oliva @Janeishly compare this with: open a web page, click on a button, give the URL to the people you want to talk with
and most importantly for those people: click on the URL that you've received from the techie relative who wants to talk to you, and you're done
Alexandre Oliva
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •gotta compare apples to apples, though
surely you've received the URL through some kind of communicator that had to be installed, and the contact set up
Jami is that kind of communicator. once you have it installed, and contacts set up, leveling the playing field, getting into a conversation, or starting one, is actually easier than visiting a URL
CC: @Janeishly@mastodonapp.uk
Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Alexandre Oliva • •@Alexandre Oliva @Janeishly most people already have an email account that can be used to send that URL
(and now I'm tempted to invite some relative of mine to a jitsi call by sending them a postcard)
Alexandre Oliva
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •I'm told most people hardly ever look at their email these days. indeed, a lot of people don't even have one.
and they're not wrong. why use email that they need to go visit a web page to see, when a communicator like Jami brings messages, files and calls right into their devices?
CC: @Janeishly@mastodonapp.uk
Janeishly
in reply to Alexandre Oliva • • •7666
in reply to Alexandre Oliva • • •Alexandre Oliva
in reply to 7666 • • •I don't think I've come across this concept before. what are these "inbox rules" you speak of?
Jami, being Free Software, could probably have that and any other features that are desirable added. they don't even have to make sense for the business model of the original developers, and we're already at an advantage because Jami is not built with a goal of surveillance, control and exploitation
CC: @valhalla@social.gl-como.it
7666
in reply to Alexandre Oliva • • •email is transactional by nature, meaning you can inject pre-processing filters/rules/logic/whatever into that before it is deposited into a mailbox. i have about 30 that do labeling, "mark as read" duties, sorting into subfolders, blocking, and more, which keeps the signal to noise ratio really high. chat on the other hand is more real-time and you can't quite as easily filter, sort, etc., that's why i generally don't prefer it.
even fedi has the same sort of transactional backing using posts allowing for filters, blocks, rewrites, whatever
Phantasm likes this.
twinebad
in reply to 7666 • • •Phantasm likes this.
Alexandre Oliva
in reply to twinebad • • •I don't mean to invalidate your experience, but communication media are very much what we (and our communication parties) make of them. I find the asynchronicity of email generally welcome, but I've also been in very high-bandwidth email communications, and some people expect immediate responses; I've also been in very low-bandwidth chat groups, but the interactivity can be useful at times. the very same social media networks can be overwhelming or desertic, depending on your contacts, and on what you use it for. in my case, missing an email can be a problem, but missing a chat message is no biggie, so "catching up" can be as easy as "mark it all read" (if there are even such markers in the chat client). but while some people use chat for throw-away conversations, some run businesses out of it, and for them discarding chat messages could be as bad as missing an email or a critical notification. my observation is that the properties we tend to assign to these media are not inherent to the media, but to the customs of the groups we interact with through them.
CC: @7666@comp.lain.la @valhalla@social.gl-como.it
7666
in reply to Alexandre Oliva • • •i have way too many streams of inbound communication at the moment to where the inherent "ticket system" style of email is the only way i can ensure I don't actually miss a message, plus with the universal compatibility of email i can get them in multiple different flavors, automate systems to dump interesting things into my mailbox, and so on.
i find that if it is acceptable for a chat message to have been missed than it just shouldn't have been sent in the first place to me. my IRC presence as an example has continued to shrink because I only entertained the concept of IRC when i needed new streams of interaction and now fedi and email covers all the bases for me, especially since the implied SLA is "when I get around to it" and not real-time.
for actual real-time communication i just prefer voice. sometimes i can have a call and write emails simultaneously, even. but even at work I shy away from chat due to the violent context switching it can cause.
Alexandre Oliva
in reply to 7666 • • •GNU Jami offers some hope for that sort of features, that could presumably be added initially with its plugin architecture
that it uses per-conversation git repos with per-message commits underneath seems to make classification as simple as tagging the commits under some convention. that sort of thing would definitely be welcome to me. it's too easy to get things lost there.
CC: @valhalla@social.gl-como.it
mangeurdenuage :gnu: :trisquel: :gondola_head: 🌿 :abeshinzo: :ignutius: :descartes: :stargate: likes this.
Janeishly
in reply to Alexandre Oliva • • •@lxo Well obviously that's all straightforward. But can I also schedule a call? That's the key functionality that I need. These are calls for various different groups of people at different times, never the same time/day.
(I should say that I'm currently trialling Infomaniak's service instead. I'm not averse to trying Jitsi again, but it's slipped to the bottom of the pile now.)
Alexandre Oliva
in reply to Janeishly • • •Janeishly
in reply to Alexandre Oliva • • •Alexandre Oliva
in reply to Janeishly • • •so the invitation is currently sent by email by the platform, but I suppose that's immaterial: it could be sent by any party, and it didn't have to be an email, it could (also) be a post to the chat group. I don't think it has a feature to post a reminder for a recurring meeting, though; maybe that's what you were looking for?
another point I don't get is whether you want the platform to reject participants outside of the scheduled meeting time. ISTM that ensuring the platform is there at the desired time is what it takes, and if it is available at other times, I don't see how that would hurt. but I'm not the one setting the requirements, I'm just trying to understand them to see whether GNU Jami would fit the bill for you. but really the only way to tell for sure would be by your giving it a try.
the one concern I would raise is that I don't know how big the meetings are. I haven't been to big meetings on Jami, and though it has worked superbly for 1:1 meetings even with my very old and slow and low-bandwidth computer (where no other chat system did), meeting 3 or 4 people at once was more than it (the computer) could endure. even more powerful computers may face trouble with very large meetings on Jami, though, because IIUC the party that initiates the group call becomes the one who receives the audio (and video) feeds from everyone else, and passes it on to everyone else.
so very large groups in GNU Jami could be as problematic as a very underpowered Jitsi server