The Internet is great but sometimes searching it without the exact term to look for can be an exercise in futility. I first heard about Jitsi as a great alternative to Zoom, the videoconference service that suddenly took over the market in the age of COVID-19, on one of the podcasts hosted by Leo Laporte. It's open-source (read:free, to most people) and has no time-limit, not like the 45-minute constraint faced by Zoom non-subscribers. Some time later, someone else mentioned it so I decided to check it out. On a side note, it annoys me greatly that many people these days don't go directly to a website even when one is give to them, but instead first go to Google.com or such and search for said web site. Such action can be so time-wasting, as you don't necessarily find what you need right away. Such is the case with me and Jitsi, in the beginning.
All I had to go by was the term Jitsi so I had to search for it. One link after another, I found myself downloading some Jitsi application for the Mac that prompted me to login, either via Google Talk, AIM, or some other chat network. Definitely not what I was looking for. I used to use x number of chat clients and it was such a pain keeping so many accounts and passwords. I never want to go back to that. Then there was some other Jitsi thingamajitsi that can be downloaded to have my own Jitsi server. Good grief, I just want to start a meeting with someone to test things out, why do I have to setup a server just for that? I started to try to find documentation for Jitsi. Some doc pointed me to jit.si but it's a dead link. Some other doc had a nice table of content but page after page merely says Welcome to Jitsi with no useful content whatsoever. Talk about going down the rabbit hole! Running into cul-de-sacs on the information highway!
What I should really search for was Jitsi Meet. People wrongly associate terms with the actual things themselves regularly, either because they are too familiar with the product, or just ignorance. I've heard users refer to Google Chrome, the web browser, as just Google. It dries me nuts! The best thing I could have done, assuming I had the exact info handy, was to go straight to https://meet.jit.si/ . Jitsi Meet's approach is a bit different, in that you just enter a room name and away you go. The Jitsi Meet web site has some code running that makes up random room names for visitors to use. I was initially lost and used one of those random names just to see what's going on. The thing is just click in the box where the name is being generated and make up your own name then you are all set. Note that there is no scheduling capability. You just create the room on the fly, when everyone gets out, the room disappears. Past room names are remembered by the web browser or smartphone app, so the room can be created anew when needed In a way it looks like the meeting can be scheduled, but it's really not.
Once in a meeting, things are not that much different than Zoom or other videoconference web sites. You can mute yourself, mute participants if you are the host, blur the background, start a chat, the usual stuff. End-to-end encryption is in beta but that makes Jitsi Meet attractive security-wise. You cannot setup a fancy virtual background, so it's a minor loss. (Ironically, just the other day I spent much time cobbling together a process to make fancy video of names of Zoom participants. Now the video is useless for these Jitsi Meeting.)
On a computer, you truly don't need any software. I discovered later the chat client I downloaded is Jitsi Desktop. It has little to do with the videoconferencing capability of Jitsi Meet. Jitsi Meet may be a side project of Jitsi Desktop, but for the average user pretend you never heard of Jitsi Desktop. Just go straight to meet.jit.si . Likewise, you don't need to install any server software if all you want to do is host or attend a meeting. The server stuff is for the Linux platform anyway, like Debian or Ubuntu. I don' care what the Linux gurus say, the average user doesn't need to know about Linux. One more time, meet.jit.si is all you need. You do need to setup a name before you can participate in a chat, but that's the extent of "setting up" to use Jitsi Meet on a computer.
On a smartphone, you do need to install the free app. It's straightforward, nothing to stress about. In case you somehow have to type the name of the meeting, it is case-insensitive, i.e. case doesn't matter. I was worried since Jitsi Meet is open-source and since there was mention of Linux and Unix, a world where case matters, that Jitsi Meetings are case-sensitive also but luckily it's not.
Jitsi Meet is a very viable alternative to Zoom. I got free minutes from Zoom before, I don't know what algorithm determined that, so it's possible your Zoom meeting is long enough to get things done. However, if you don't want to worry about time-limit and can live without the convenience of having a schedule, or the fancy virtual backgrounds, Jitsi Meet is a natural choice, especially for those mindful of spending money.
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