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by dijksterhuis·6y ago·view on hn ↗
Because there are other factors to consider for each user's use case.

Jitsi wouldn't work for the Zoom meetings I admin. It's too technical for a very untechnical audience.

Zoom was hard enough, and 90% of the meetings in our ecosystem use Zoom, meaning they only need one app. Asking them to use Jitsi would require two (as every other meeting uses Zoom), which means a non technical audience has to learn 2 technical things instead of 1.

In the case of E2E encryption, every attendee has to type in the meeting key when they join for it to work. The users I work with will forget/won't understand why etc. They just want to speak to people. So that will render e2e useless if 1 out of 20 attendees doesn't do it.

Not to mention we have attendees who don't own a smartphone so have to dial in. Making the E2E Jitsi stuff pointless.

Jitsi is great for technical people. Zoom is great for non technical people.

4 comments
Zoom is harder to use initially - you have to install it on desktop. Meet.jit.si you literally just go to the address.

None of our extended family c.20 people from teens to elders (c.80yo) needed help - we've been using it daily amongst us since the pandemic broke out.

People who have used Zoom several times still need help; it's more complex (that's good and bad).

90% of our Zoom users use smart phones and install the app, which is a normal and understood process by most smartphone users.

EDIT -- I've actually just gone off to try out jitsi again (i do actually check to see if it's worth switching platforms) and it turns out it asks me to install an android app too. So Jit.si itself actually needs me to download software on my smartphone. So......

There are a myriad of things that mean Zoom fits our use case better. I'm not going to enumerate all of them as I'd be here for an hour.

My point was that Zoom fits some use cases better, and that seems to be the case more often than not for users with less technical ability than the HN userbase.

Are you sure you aren't underestimating the intelligence of your audience? ;-)
Don't get me wrong, our users are very intelligent. They've done great things on Zoom.

But technical "whizzkid stuff" (as they call it) is not something they are comfortable with.

"Zoom was hard enough"

Which would imply that some users had issues getting onto Zoom, the easiest of these systems to join. So why make it harder?

"Zoom, the easiest of these systems to join"

wat? That's a totally-incorrect assumption. Zoom requires installation of software. Jitsi doesn't.

Posted this in reply to another reply to my original parent.

> I've actually just gone off to try out jitsi again (i do actually check to see if it's worth switching platforms) and it turns out it asks me to install an android app too. So Jit.si itself actually needs me to download software on my smartphone. So......

This is exactly one of the points I was trying to make. 90% of of the other meetings in our eco-system of meetings use Zoom. Adding additional barriers is something we have to try and avoid in our use case.
How and in what way is jitsi "too technical"? It's trivial to use.
I also don’t understand, maybe it’s not trivial for the host and for setting up a server, but for the client is just opening an url.
I'm the only administrator and we have meetings running 7 nights a week.

I'd quite like to not have to unexpectedly sacrifice 4 hours of my time finding a bug in the config. Nor do I really want to spend (at least) a weekend to double check all the install/config works correctly to start with.

I'm busy enough with the day job without starting a second one. I admin this voluntarily and I'd rather work smart, not hard.

EDIT: You can see my reply to the parent for user side technical effort. A helpful hint might be to think about this problem in people terms, rather than systems terms.

As per a reply to another child comment.

> My point was that Zoom fits some use cases better, and that seems to be the case more often than not for users with less technical ability than the HN userbase.

Some of our users may be, in the kindest possible way, completely batshit insane with their life falling apart when they first turn up to our meetings.

Meeting hosts [0] can explain Zoom to them in three/four steps and look after them from there with in meeting controls. With Jitsi, they've got to keep asking them to stop unmuting themself because they keep pressing buttons... Which means they have to stop the meeting for 5 minutes, again and again and again.

EDIT for further information / clarity:

Zoom also enables users to chat without any additional steps [1]. With Jitsi you have to create a name to even see the chat. So new users may connect, not hear anything [2] and then just leave and not come back. Zoom, they can see the message we send them and then we can guide them from there.

Then there's the fact that meeting hosts cannot screen share from smartphone with Jitsi -- 90% of our users/hosts are smartphone only [3]. This would require them buying a laptop. Many hosts cannot do this / adds to technical effort.

Then there's the fact that we'd have to type in the name of the Jitsi meeting EXACTLY whenever we want to start the meeting. Hosts would have to get the name of the meeting ID exactly correct every week. To make meeting IDs secure, that'd mean they have to type a complex character sequence out perfectly every day. (Yes they can copypasta, but some aren't even that technically adept).

Then of course there's always the chance someone else uses that meeting ID at the same time by accident! There's no method I saw where you can reserve a Jitsi meeting ID only for our use [4]. Oh, and while I'm here, what about the fact that you cannot schedule a jitsi meeting ID ahead of time? So there's no scheduling a call / meeting available.

I might as well talk about security too -- anyone in a Jitsi meeting can start a live recording [5]. And any participant can just remove and change the meeting password at any time. And no waiting rooms. And once a user is removed, they can just join again -- repeat Zoombombings, woo!

And then this doesn't even begin to cover the fact that hosts need to go through all the steps to set up a meeting [6] every time they start a meeting. Zoom handles all that with the default settings I enable for them as admin.

Some of this can be covered by custom Jitsi server installs. But that introduces way more technical effort on my side and doesn't cover dial in phone options (at least in a simple and forward maintainable way).

I'd rather pay Zoom £20 a month.

====

Addendum: I just tried setting up a password for a meeting and then inviting myself. The password wasn't required to join... Pretty poor!

[0]: not me, I'm admin

[1]: e.g. in the case of buggy audio

[2]: maybe they didn't accept the permissions properly

[3]: tested on latest android app

[4]: I could be wrong, but this is a simple option for Zoom

[5]: An absolute no-no for us.

[6]: set up the password, mute participants to start with, chat with host only (not an option on jitsi), amongst others

You clearly haven’t used jitsi in the last 6 months or so.
> EDIT -- I've actually just gone off to try out jitsi again (i do actually check to see if it's worth switching platforms) and it turns out it asks me to install an android app too. So Jit.si itself actually needs me to download software on my smartphone. So......

Posted in reply to a child comment earlier ^.

When I originally scoped out which platforms fitted our use case best, it was Jitsi vs. Zoom in the end. This was 3 months ago.

We ended up with Zoom for several reasons specific to our use case.

No software is a magic bullet that solves 100% of use cases. This is why competition exists.