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by rythmshifter03 1574 days ago
Please don't encourage the use of Zoom, they already have enough market share they don't deserve after lying through their teeth to the public on multiple occasions.
3 comments

What alternatives do you recommend? As far as I can tell none of the major video conferencing solutions are made by companies I think are any more trustworthy than Zoom at this point. Plus Google and others ran a focused assassination campaign against Zoom at the start of the pandemic to claw some of their market share.
There is Matrix (https://matrix.org) which now integrates nicely with Jitsi (https://jitsi.org). There's also BigBlueButton (https://bigbluebutton.org).
Google is certainly more secure than Zoom to outside attacks.

Regardless of what Google chooses to do with your data, they do want to protect that data from everyone else, on your behalf. At least as much as any company can (government subpoena affects all companies).

I don’t understand why zoom is so much more popular than Google meet. I never used zoom before my current company who uses Google meets for daily meetings and then zoom meeting for the biweekly review. No idea what advantages zoom is supposed to have.
I think Zoom just had a better sales team and went after corporate clients earlier. Now that no one is in the office, it seems silly, because Meet is just straight up a nicer experience on all fronts, but in the Old Days, no one ever got fired for putting Zoom hardware in a conference room.
It seems like the popularity of Zoom is related to the singularity of the product's purpose. Zoom is a video conferencing service. Google is everything and the kitchen sink. So when the pandemic started, that worked in Zoom's favor, sadly.
Thick clients perform better than Google Meet in the browser in my experience.
I know it’s not seen as a professional service, but Discord has great quality video chat (better than Zoom, for example). I don’t know if its privacy/security would hold up for larger companies but we use it in my tiny company with no issues at all.
Any recommendations on getting Discord notifications to reliably show up in a reasonable time on mobile? That's the one big issue I have with Discord. Otherwise I find it very useful.
If you have the desktop client up, you don't get mobile notifications. They've always worked fine for me so long as I don't set my status as do not disturb
Mattermost has replaced Slack here and I don't miss it at all. Jitsi Meet is pretty good for a/v
My team uses Slack for text and voice chat (huddles) and Jitsi Meet for free, in-browser video chat without signup required.
Jitsi[0] is excellent.

[0]: https://meet.jit.si/

Discord is easily best quality for now, Matrix/Jitsi is easily best future vision. Everything else can go away.
Self-hosted Matrix
what do you mean lying through their teeth? citation needed.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/11/ftc-r...

> In its complaint, the FTC alleged that, since at least 2016, Zoom misled users by touting that it offered “end-to-end, 256-bit encryption” to secure users’ communications, when in fact it provided a lower level of security... In reality, the FTC alleges, Zoom maintained the cryptographic keys that could allow Zoom to access the content of its customers’ meetings, and secured its Zoom Meetings, in part, with a lower level of encryption than promised.

See also: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/zoom-security-privacy-woes

"end to end encryption" means "it's encrypted at both ends"
Wikipedia has a few paragraphs dedicated to their lack of privacy, security, and other unethical telemetry practices. I believe it was a couple years ago when these stories maintained headline positions for a few weeks.
They can tell me they're the second coming of Christ as long as they make televideo work better than all the crap alternatives.