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Read and share online: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/membership/jitsi-meet-an-often-overlooked-member-benefit
Dear Free Software Supporter,
Time flies at the FSF, but it seems it's been more than three years
since I last drew attention to the need (and thankfully, existence) of
solutions for free software videoconferencing. At the time of my
writing, the FSF office was closed because of the pandemic, and the
office staff had almost entirely transitioned to remote work. From a
purely technical perspective, this wasn't all that difficult for us.
We're likely one of the only nonprofits that uses that bastion of the
early nineties -- IRC -- as a core piece of infrastructure. For
others, it wasn't so easy.
In particular, I remember hesitating before writing this line:
If you're able, hosting your own instance [of Jitsi] is the most
free and reliable method.
When you interact with the free software community as much as I do,
rattling off a line like this is probably easier than it should be.
Every workday and most weekends, I talk to people who consider
spinning up an instance of something as trivial, even when it's a
program as complex, as Jitsi. While the difficulty of hosting services
for yourself is overblown (unless it's email!), most people don't have
this kind of luxury. It's easy enough to write "if you're able," but
for most, that "if" is a big one, especially if you're going to do it
without forking over your freedom in the process.
Despite how it added one more and quite complex service to the dozens
that the FSF tech team is already responsible for, we didn't take very
long to decide that offering a Jitsi server as an associate
member benefit was something that we had to do. At the time, we
were seeing thousands flock to services like Zoom that deprive them of
their freedom; whole national court systems were and still are
being conducted on a product that harvests user data and lied
about its security capabilities. Due to its nonfree JavaScript, we
could not recommend any public Jitsi Meet server that we knew
about. And while we're often lampooned for our strict stance on
software freedom, we felt that need to help users so urgently that we
couldn't recommend the default instance. We had to start our own.
So, we did.
Unlike the flagship server, ours does not require a third-party login.
It does not use nonfree JavaScript, and it does not recommend nonfree
software or browser extensions. This is a Jitsi that we had to spend
time making. We didn't simply spin it up and forget about it.
I'm proud to say that our Jitsi Meet server has been humming
along all this time. We've heard of it being used for family calls,
town meetings, tabletop roleplaying games, and trivia shows. Because
we don't spy on you, we rely on you to tell us what you're doing
with it. We're always happy to hear stories like this, to know that
people are finding one of our membership benefits useful.
With an associate membership, you can start a Jitsi room and invite
whoever you please, whether or not they have an FSF account. You're
not handing over your credentials to Apple or Google by proxy, only
the bare minimum required to authenticate you -- to a small nonprofit
that cares so strongly about your and our digital autonomy that we
work harder than organizations at twice or ten (or more!) times our
size, against the combined might of just about every major tech
corporation on the planet.
We care that much about you and your freedom, and we hope that you'll
use our Jitsi server.
By supporting us today, you help secure a free future. If every
reader of this email supports our efforts by ensuring a
contribution, we can increase our strength and direct our
resources towards developing helpful resources like our free Jitsi
server. Or, you can advocate for user freedom by convincing just one
person to join the FSF. Your contribution will count towards
achieving our fall goal of $375,000 before December 31.
Happy hacking,
Greg Farough
Campaigns Manager
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