Element Call: Secure video conferencing for Matrix

Jure Repinc@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 166 points – Secure video conferencing for Matrix
element.io

Element Call is an open source end-to-end encrypted video and voice conferencing solution built on the Matrix protocol for secure communication.

We’re developing Element Call to provide the best possible security properties with compulsory end-to-end encryption, supporting sender verification, forward secrecy, post-compromise secrecy, zero-trust decentralisation and cross-domain capability. It achieves this by building on the foundations of Matrix as a mature, audited [1], open standard protocol for secure communication.

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This is awesome and has been a long-time coming. I wonder how much (if any) of Jitsi Meet is still part of the code? I just know that Matrix was struggling with secured video for a long time, and initially leveraged Jitsi Meet for their video chat with more than two participants.

Doesn't Jitsi Meet require an account on questionable services to host meetings nowadays?

No they don't, only on the first-party website. Jitsi is FOSS, with thousands of deployments.

I think Jitsi and Jitsi Meet are a bit different. Jitsi Meet is an easy to use system based on Jitsi and one of its deployments. I was talking about Jitsi Meet here, not about Jitsi (the protocol) itself

Yeah, so...just use a different instance 😃

Can you recommend some of them?

Uhhhh there's a list of them somewhere. I have my own. Used framatalk for a while but they shut down entirely for the same reason Jitsi now requires verification. Brave also uses it.

I dont know, I really havent followed closely in a while. I just remember last time I tried Matrix they were using Jitsi

I remember using Jitsi Meet before and it was fine. But when I tried it again a few months ago, it started demanding an account for hosts. I think the options for account providers were Google, Github and LinkedIn but don't remember exactly

There are instances that work without an account still. It's the main benefit of the whole thing.

I thought Jitsi Meet is like a separate partially proprietary app that uses Jitsi open-source technologies. Does it support self-hosting? Jitsi itself is extremely complicated to set up

Jitsi meet is the hosted service of the open source project provided by the developers. The proprietary variant is 8x8.com

Doesn't element already support calls?

That isn't built on Matrix afaik, it's specific to the Element client.

If I remember correctly it needs a (CO) TURN server, so maybe this is about an embedded solution?