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by pkrefta 2660 days ago
What are viable web-based alternatives to Skype ? (Except for Hangouts)
5 comments

I like https://appear.in for video chats with friends and family, in fact their "room"-based approach works much better there IMHO than the "call"-based approach from Skype. But appear.in is absolutely not a full Skype replacement, if you are looking for contact lists and presence and chat functionality (you can chat in an appear.in room, but it is made for video) and/or the possibility to call phone lines.
I use https://meet.jit.si

I've never had a Skype account, since it required installing proprietary software, and then it became Microsoft which put me off it even more. I've also not used Google Hangouts, since I've heard that doing so would break the XMPP functionality of my Google Account (not sure how up-to-date this info is).

Anecdotally, I've been on Skype calls between friends (as in, connecting two rooms of people), and it seemed really laggy and low quality (this was post-Microsoft, which I hear changed the architecture from fast P2P to slow centralised, presumably for surveillance purposes).

Once it kept cutting out and I recommended trying meet.jit.si; that didn't cut out and had much better quality video. Tangentially: people were initially reluctant to try it, since they didn't want to bother signing up to a different service; implying some general assumption that all Web sites or P2P networks (a) require an "account" of some sort and (b) "accounts" must be distinct and not reusable. What a sorry state of affairs :(

That said, I've also had calls on meet.jit.si which were laggy until we turned off the video. So neither is perfect!

Depends on how you use Skype, but I have used both https://appear.in/ and Zoom (there is a web version!) successfully.

Think you would have to define your use case slightly more.

jitsi meet works really well.
Is jitsi any good?
It is, as long as you don't need to do anything else on your computer at the same time. It's an absolute resource hog.
Yes. I use it almost exclusively.

With a browser plugin you can even share your screen and there is a self hosted version, too.

On Firefox, no plugin is needed for screen sharing. I wonder why one is needed in Chrome.