this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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Why not jitsi meet? Isn't better to use an already "established" opensource conferencing tool?
They could just selfhost their instance.
They've been building an entire open source suite of software tailored to their needs. If I had to guess, Jitsi isn't performant enough for large (100+) user meetings in a way they can scale easily. It's a great tool, but it seems better geared towards smaller loads. Video conferencing at scale is a pretty big challenge.
Between this, their new Docs platform and some Matrix-based chat platforms, I think this is something they've put a fair bit of thought into how they want to build. Overall, it's a cool initiative, but I think it's pretty clear that it's open source as a means to be transparent as a government organization rather than to form a platform for broad use by everyone. They do have some self-hosting instructions on their GitHub though.
I was wondering the same, but this does make sense.
At the same time, it might also make sense to build on top of existing FOSS tooling rather than building new, but I suppose that depends on where the bottlenecks are and if stuff like proprietary codecs might be involved
Jitsi is owned by a Campbell, California based firm called 8x8. Source: I worked for them during the acquisition.
Though admittedly avoiding US origin open source is unlikely to be possible. The thing they are using seems to be based on another package with a similar issue.
Being open source, that's a non issue.