A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 1:09 UTC (Wed) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087)
In reply to: A farewell to email by gerdesj
Parent article: A farewell to email

I am quite fond of videoconferencing. Sadly, the site that I used to use for it (appear.in) has gone login required, same for hangouts.

I really wanted webrtc, also, to be a totally distributed medium,
so I could say... oh - meet me in somehash. Seems sort of feasible,
but there's an awful lot of mitm going on for webrtc....

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 1:38 UTC (Wed) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (5 responses)

What do you mean "awful lot of MITM going on for WebRTC"?

It's not that difficult to set up your own WebRTC site with whatever user identification approach you like.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 1:53 UTC (Wed) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link] (4 responses)

MITM in this case is that I wanted to self publish my own webrtc server, with code that just worked, anywhere I wanted. Instead we have hangouts and appear.in.

If there has been substantial work on making a usable local webrtc
service rendezvous service and relevant javascript for it, please point me at it!!!

I didn't mean MITM on the voice/video part, but on the rendezvous part.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 6:16 UTC (Wed) by laarmen (subscriber, #63948) [Link]

I haven't tested it locally yet, but I think Jitsi might be what you're looking for?

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 12:41 UTC (Wed) by dr@jones.dk (subscriber, #7907) [Link]

Most promising in my opinion is Janus: https://janus.conf.meetecho.com/

Jitsi has existed for a long time, but your remarks about local javascript makes me suspect that you will like the approach taken by Janus.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 13:39 UTC (Wed) by BeS (guest, #43108) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe you want to give Nextcloud Talk a try? https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Just download the zip file, extract it to a web directory, visit the page to complete the installation, enable the talk appand you have your own web conferencing system and much more

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 2:43 UTC (Thu) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link]

thx! I'll try those!

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 1:47 UTC (Wed) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link]

A few months ago I participated in a critical upgrade which went sideways. We ended up video conferencing with senior engineers from the vendor to help restore things over a 12 hour period (Friday night to Saturday morning). Thankfully service was restored, but I coincidentally was scheduled to take two week leave shortly thereafter and so never had time to fully document the situation--not that I could have adequately recounted the engineers' advice and explanations during the marathon troubleshooting session.

Fast forward to yesterday and we're doing some maintenance and I'm trying to remember precisely what the problems were and what to look out for. But there was no transcript! No e-mail, no chat logs, nothing. So I had to poke around the systems looking for shell and MySQL history files (luckily still there as all of these services were hosted on AWS EC2 without persistent disks) to help me reconstruct the night from memory and scraps of code.

I realize some people *need* to converse directly with people (ideally in person but minimally with audio/video) to help them process information. I'm the complete opposite--listening requires considerable focus and energy on my part[1] and I far prefer the written word for digesting information. But as a practical matter you *really* need a transcript of the conversation, and video conferencing just doesn't do a very good job of that, if at all.

[1] A trick I learned from a professor was to close my eyes. At first I thought he was just being pretentious and condescending, like he was suffering fools. But I tried it and it really helps. Nonetheless, it still takes considerable attention just to listen, leaving me less capacity for comprehension, analysis, and response.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 16:11 UTC (Thu) by clopez (guest, #66009) [Link]

Try jitsi meet. It is much better than appear.in

There is a public deployment of it at https://meet.jit.si

It's open source, you can deploy it in your servers if you wish