Wikipedia talk:Meetup/NYC/April 2021

Dashboard

Jitsi / Zoom
Thanks for adding this to the agenda. Thought I'd provide some context for the current situation before the discussion tonight.

We used Jitsi for a few meetings early on (as well as Google Meet and one other one I can't remember). Some of the reasons we wound up using Zoom are ease of use, predictability, and the feature set. There's something to be said for settling on a single platform to all meetings so that people know what to expect and don't have to learn more than one (and in terms of learning curve, more people have experience using Zoom, although I get that "use the dominant platform because it's dominant" isn't always a great argument). Because of the features Zoom has, it can be used with a wider variety of meeting types. For example, Jitsi developers at the time were suggesting keeping meetings under [40?] people, which is fine for WikiWednesday for now, but we'd need to switch platforms to have a larger event. Zoom also had other features like breakout rooms, a white board, etc. which Jitsi didn't have (at least not at the time -- I can't speak to what Jitsi is like now).

"Zoombombing" happens with all platforms when meeting hosts don't properly secure the meeting (there's zoombombing on Jitsi, too -- or Jitsibombing I guess?). IIRC Zoom was just the most popular when the term was coined. They also got a lot of bad press for their default settings being very lax on security and ineffectively communicating risks and how to mitigate them. In response, they rolled out a bunch of new features and changed some default settings. Beyond just meeting passwords being available, there's a waiting room which can be used before joining, the ability to move people to the waiting room, ability to mute people or turn off their video, to mute everyone or turn off everyone's video, to lock down new people joining, tightening up who can share their screen, kicking people out of meetings, etc. It's certainly not perfect, but at this point (or at least last time I did a review), especially when used by hosts who understand in-meeting security best practices, Zoom may actually be the least susceptible to Zoombombing because of the way these features are easily accessible to hosts on the fly. When you hear one of us fumbling to let people in or enable someone's screensharing ability it's because we're navigating that security interface. :)

The main point of weakness for us is that we post the Zoom link publicly on this meetup page and don't require registration or a password. We err on the side of ease of use to make our meetings as accessible as possible, with the idea that if other people joining becomes a problem, we would change that practice. I think we put that and a bunch of these other questions to WikiWednesday attendees back in one of the earlier online meetings, but I could be wrong.

All of this said, I can't speak to the technical security issue(s) you mentioned. I know Zoom has had some pretty public controversies in terms of privacy, and many of us have/had reservations about its company practices. In the end, it came down to "it just works better, lets us do more, and people know how to use it" vs. "it's good enough most of the time and its values are closer to our own," and the former won out.

Sorry for this big block of text. I'm posting this for context, not because I don't think we should discuss it. To the contrary, I'd look forward to learning where Jitsi stands in comparison with Zoom, and to learn more about the implications for end-to-end encryption. &mdash; Rhododendrites  talk \\ 17:18, 21 April 2021 (UTC)