Jitsi, the open-source video conferencing platform, now requires a Google, Microsoft, or Facebook account for their online service
Jitsi, the open-source video conferencing platform, now requires a Google, Microsoft, or Facebook account for their online service
What’s going on? Starting on August 24th, we will no longer support the anonymous creation of rooms on meet.jit.si, and will require the use of an account (we will be supporting Google, GitHub and Facebook […]
While Jitsi is open-source, most people use the platform they provide, meet.jit.si, for immediate conference calls. They have now introduced a "Know Your Customer" policy and require at least one of the attendees to log in with a Facebook, Github (Microsoft), or Google account.
One option to avoid this is to self-host, but then you'll be identifiable via your domain and have to maintain a server.
As a true alternative to Jitsi, there's jami.net. It is a decentralized conference app, free open-source, and account creation is optional. It's available for all major platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android), including on F-Droid.
Those are all SaaS providers with meeting software available. If someone was using Jitsi, it was specifically to not use a login with any of those providers. They're actively deciding not to continue operation with this. Its like when OnlyFans declares they wouldn't allow adult content going forward
Its like when OnlyFans declares they wouldn't allow adult content
So... Tumblr?
OnlyFans announced it too, but walked back on it later.
Yeah but at least Tumblr had a majority of non porn content. Jitsi is almost entirely privacy wonks, and only fans is almost entirely porn
I imagine that, at least, the videos wouldn't go through those SAAS providers, and that's relatively a plus still.
Those are all SaaS providers with meeting software available.
With paid for commercial meeting software available.
If someone was using Jitsi, it was specifically to not use a login with any of those providers.
Or because they didn't want to pay ongoing SAAS fees.
They're actively deciding not to continue operation with this. Its like when OnlyFans declares they wouldn't allow adult content going forward
It's literally nothing like that since Onlyfans is not an open source project that lets you host your own instance and run it however you like.
If you want anonymity run it yourself. If you want to use their servers it's reasonable that they expect to know a modicum about how to verify you are who you say you are. There is literally no other way to prevent abuse other than identity verification of bad actors.
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My experience has been that Jitsi is much better when the connection is bad. However, its default setting is that video is cropped to be square, which is very bad. I don’t even think that the user can change that.
Why is everyone up in arms about this? The abuse of their free service was rampant. This isn't a core project change, this is just a measure to keep a version of the project up for free without completely taking it down. They don't even have a way to monetize this. An alternative was to simply shut it down and only allow you to self host it.
I self host my Jitsi instance, but as a privacy nut, I don't see a problem with this. Absolute privacy cannot always coexist with free anonymous services. Don't blame Jitsi, blame the people who ruined it for everyone else.
How was their free service abused?
By overusing it, I think.
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In this case, it sure does sound like abuse. Considering the careful wording, combined with the seemingly kneejerk reaction of requiring authentication, there was likely illegal activity going on:
Earlier this year we saw an increase in the number of reports we received about some people using our service in ways that we cannot tolerate. To be more clear, this was not about some people merely saying things that others disliked.
Over the past several months we tried multiple strategies in order to end the violations of our terms of service. However in the end, we determined that requiring authentication was a necessary step to continue operating meet.jit.si.
It was a free, anonymous service that let people stream video and send messages. Consider for a moment if that "video" was actually non-video data encoded to be streamed through Jitsi and sent to another location. Or, consider if the video was video, but was so egregious and illegal, that Jitsi had to take action. It doesn't take a lot of thinking to consider the kinds of activities could have been going on.
This is its downfall
Earlier this year we saw an increase in the number of reports we received about some people using our service in ways that we cannot tolerate. To be more clear, this was not about some people merely saying things that others disliked.
Cannot be less clear.
Anyway I don't understand why you'd need an account. I've always created rooms and share the link to people to invite. You can setup a password if you want privacy. Any reason to login?
They are probably talking about using it to share CSAM or other illegal content. They need one person to login to be not anonymous so they can give it to the authorities if necessary.
Yepp I agree, that kind of cryptic speak and this kind of drastic action taken by a FOSS project likely eludes to something of this nature IMO.
If they want to continue to appeal to businesses they're almost certainly not going to release a statement saying people were sharing illegal material on our platform especially when they're not a big well-known company like Facebook, Google and Microsoft, where normal people tend to disappointingly dismiss bad findings with a "benefit of the doubt" stance.
I assume their hosted version doesn't have this limitation? In that sense, this news really is a non-issue I think, considering everyone usually has one of those three accounts. Someone looking for privacy should probably host their own IMO
There was likely a broad campaign of abuse that violated some sorta law. There’s not really another reason for this move short of something that puts them in an untenable situation.
"One option to avoid this is to self-host, but then you’ll be identifiable via your domain and have to maintain a server."
Makes it a non issue.
It's free as in freedom not as in free beer and that's that.
Jitsi doesn't have to offer free service and they particularly don't have to provide anonymity.
The same is true for the fediverse, since the admins have info that could help identify users. That has it's uses too.
Jitsi remains free. As you can see, this isn't about money but rather about privacy, which has diminished compared to before.
The issue with centralized systems becomes more apparent: the provders are held accountable for their users' actions.
@esaru @bmaxv @technology concur that this reduces privacy for users of Jitsi’s hosted service. It also has some concrete benefits for Jitsi - they get to outsource account validation and security. Perhaps they were struggling to contain abuse.
Privacy has not diminished, you can host your own instance of the jitsi software account-free and take on the liability of people using your server for child porn yourself if you want to.
Relax. Just use a different server. May not be exactly accurate either. How in the world do you have any idea who uses what server. I have never used this server.
One way is join the FSF and use their server. There are others or host your own too. The load and cost needs to be spread anyway.
It ded
It's hypocritical to call your service "privacy friendly" and then require the use of a Google/Facebook/GitHub account to log in. I kinda understand the reason why they do this, but they could have at least allowed you to use a more private email provider.
Calling them hypocritical is hysterical when they offer all the source code for free and you can host your own instance that doesn't need an account.
@owiseedoubleyou
It's more likely about OIDC and not "email". In which case they could have included Gitlab I guess. Let's give them a while, they'll probably figure out a list, this sounds like "how can we cover largest amount of people while adding fewest providers"
@esaru
Good thing that you can still self host it, post your favorite jitsi instances below for everyone to use.
I'll start with this one: https://calls.disroot.org/
Thanks for that link. I didn't know disroot hosted Jitsi.
For others in this thread, here's a list of Jitsi instances: https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/community/community-instances/
I guess I don't need their app anymore on my phone, then. More free space to me.
Though using an other instance as mentioned by other comments is also an option, I think the mobile app supports that too, even if it's a bit complicated
Edit: after reading the article, this might really not be their fault. At the end they also encourage the reader to host it themselves. They are not very transparent with what's the actual problem, though..
Yes, the mobile app supports third-party servers, though I wouldn't call it complicated.
If you want to join a room, all you do is type/paste the full URL to it instead of just the name. "Open in App" functionality will also work regardless of the server.
If you want to host one on a third-party server, you just go into the options and replace the "https://meet.jit.si" address with one of the third-party server. Then when you create a room, it will use that server.
This is indeed sad news. I made my friends (who don't care about free software) switch from google meet to jitsi for video calls just the other month.
The only thing that got them sold on jitsi was that it required no login.
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That said, it is completely understandable that some users may feel uncomfortable using an account to access the service. For such cases we strongly recommend hosting your own deployment of Jitsi Meet. We spend a lot of effort to keep that a very simple process and this has always been the mode of use that gives people the highest degree of privacy.
Seems like you can avoid it by self-hosting. Still a very suspicious move, kinda defeats the whole point of an alternative to big tech conference services.
Google, GitHub and Facebook for starters but may modify the list later on
Maybe they could support some auth provider from some fediverse app? That would be kinda neat.
Earlier this year we saw an increase in the number of reports we received about some people using our service in ways that we cannot tolerate. To be more clear, this was not about some people merely saying things that others disliked.
Over the past several months we tried multiple strategies in order to end the violations of our terms of service. However in the end, we determined that requiring authentication was a necessary step to continue operating meet.jit.si.
This sounds to me like a pattern of people using it for actual serious crimes (with the obvious guess being video sharing of sex crimes/trafficking/kids). I understand that that justification is used for a lot of extremely invasive privacy violations, and stuff like scanning every file in the name of that is too far, IMO, but if you're the only platform with resources to handle that traffic that allows anonymity, it's very likely to grow at a significantly larger rate than the rest of your traffic.
You can't (shouldn't) scan every file every individual sends to every other individual in order to prevent it, but once you have a platform that's capable of supporting community-type activity, it's a very real issue that you can face.
"You can host yourself with your own choices on vetting participation because here are the tools to do it" isn't really a bad line to draw. But you can't have your servers be a central point for that.
Wasn't easier to just shutdown the server?
I use jitsi just because doesn't have Facebook/Google/Microsoft login
Wonder why email as an identifier wasn’t sufficient…
ITT: People not understanding the difference between a free publicly hosted instance and the OSS tool itself.
This is about the free publicly hosted instance, used by the majority of the Jitsi users, who used it because they didn't have to login with a Google/Facebook/Github account. Which they now have to.
Lol, it was my GOTO specifically because it doesn't require a login and I can send it to my parents who need minimal clicks to enter the room. I even have family that doesn't have a github, facebook, nor google account, so they won't be able to join.
Amazing move Jitsi.
Earlier this year we saw an increase in the number of reports we received about some people using our service in ways that we cannot tolerate. To be more clear, this was not about some people merely saying things that others disliked.
What kind of "illegal things" were they doing? Say it, so that we can comprehend. Make it make sense.
Safe to assume it was child porn, because that ends up being an issue on any service that lets people share images or video privately. By not stating it directly, they don't prompt news organizations to quote the company in click bait articles about how their platform enables child porn as if that wasn't a universal issue that all services have to actively discourage.
Tbf I'd not get angry if it was jihadist recruitment, child porn, human trafficking, etc. etc.
@esaru
Shodan finds 21k instances. https://meet.ffmuc.net/ and https://meet.element.io/ are just two, and I don't expect them to require log in.I'm on mobile, but does meet.element.io just work? I would expect that to only work for Matrix users
If I'm reading it correctly, you only need one person in the meeting to have one of those accounts.
Criminals ruin everything.
I really hope this doesn't become a trend, but every time I see a few buttons for signup with email coming last I have to wonder.
Oh hell no. Why they dont make it optional?
RIP
Here are some interesting lists of alternative instances:
https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/community/community-instances/
https://ladatano.partidopirata.com.ar/jitsimeter/
https://timo-osterkamp.eu/random-redirect.htmlBy the way, by default jitsi is not end-to-end encrypted if you have more than two people in the call or need to use the videobrige for other reasons. https://jitsi.org/e2ee-in-jitsi/
Update: The e2ee implementation seems to have some issues as well: https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1118
Firefox <116 is currently not able to use the e2e-encryption, blink based browser already support it. Firefox 117 will provide the necessary infrastructure as well. I don't know if jitsi would have ot be patched to detect the firefox implementation. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1631263#c58
I didn't know Jitsi has those issues with default E2E.
Well, time to find another instance, cause fuck that noise
If its open-source, couldn't somebody just fork it and remove the login requirement?
You can self host it as well. This is just a restriction of the online service - the problem being that most people are not going to self-host their conference calls.
How disappointing.
It was great for sharing private contact info with Google/Facebook/etc friends without revealing it to those invasive services. Instead of sharing your private address where it would be harvested, you could meet in an anonymous Jitsi room, exchange addresses there, and contact each other directly from then on.
Self-hosting doesn't solve that use case, unless perhaps you're willing to buy throw-away domains and IP addresses every time you do it.
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Ah. Thank you. Decent work around, still more steps sadly enough, but it'll have to do.
lmao
RIP Jitsi ಠ_ಠ
now its time to uninstall.