The Jitsi project have just announced that they will be discontinuing anonymous use of the meet.jit.si service:
The meet.jit.si service has been my go to for online chats the last few years because it was so simple to setup and have people join. It is a shame they have had to enable authentication.
It isn’t clear if everyone joining the meeting will need to authenticate or just the person creating the room… I guess we’ll find out in the next couple of days.
It might be time to try testing out Element Call a bit more. It is still in Beta, and end-to-end encryption has been temporarily disabled while they do some testing, but it does allow anonymous access.
Now that authentication has been enabled it seems that the person starting the meeting is the only one required to login, which seems like a reasonable trade-off.
Unfortunately the only authentication methods provided seem to be via Facebook, Google, or Github. I assume this is mainly so that they don’t have to worry about managing accounts, but from a privacy perspective it is a bit disappointing.
While messing around I noticed that meet.jit.si now provides a book a meeting URL in advance feature. Interestingly if you use that method to create a room it doesn’t require you to log in.
As perhaps that’s a solution, a controlled self hosted version.