Edit: It seems that they have updated their TOS , however I will never trust a company like this , remember with all of this AI going around right now Data is the new oil.
Good alternatives you can self-host are Nextcloud Talk, Jitsi, BigBlueButton, Unhangout, and Matrix. Find a community instance of any of these if you don’t have the chops to host your own.
“Hey, Joe, tell people we won’t use their data for AI without their permission!”
“But… they already gave permission by accepting the TOS, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, but they’re too stupid to realize that. So just keep repeating that we won’t use their data without their permission. That’ll get ‘em off our backs.”
So, they’re recording and stealing our corporate secrets, etc? That’s going to go down well.
So, I suppose this means the end for Zoom use in business, no company is going to allow their intellectual property and secrets to be used by another company, especially what is essentially just their telephone call provider.
What were the alternatives? One thing I can say about zoom is that it’s easy to use, barely ever has any issues and handles a huge number of participants without a sweat.
I recall having used MS Teams before. But it often wouldn’t work, had server issues and couldn’t handle large audiences well.
I don’t see those as alternatives. Skype was always really buggy, sometimes it worked, other times it didn’t. Didn’t have great cross platform support and wasn’t suited for meetings without 500 - 1000 people. I used it in the past and it was always a huge pain to deal with.
Hangouts is nice for 1:1 chats, but it feels lacking. Last time I tried to have a screen share in a separate window it already failed to do so.
Discord isn’t really an enterprise tool.
Like… I don’t really want to defend Zoom, but the one thing they do just works.
Zoom was used a lot for small groups. Maybe for 500 - 1000 there is not much - not my user case. But people started to use it for small group meetings, and the the audio quality (in the sense how it manages multiple people talking) was always better with other software.
I was using WebEx for the longest time and our company switched to zoom. I recall that it was only for price and that there was a lot of missing functions that our team was used to.
MS Teams and Google Meet that mandatorily required Microsoft and Google accounts, as opposed to Zoom that did not need one, unless you were hosting video group chats? There is your reasoning. Also, Zoom’s stability with multiple participants and on low connection speeds makes it stand out.
I think it was because they were the only platform that supported meetings with thousands of participants. This became very important during the pandemic, but now that we are over it, they are circling the drain.
Brave has a built in webrtc calls called brave talk for quick calls. Its well suited if the person on the other end is non technical. It supports up to 4 people free and can even be used to share tabs playing video and audio to watch stuff together.
To those downvoting. Zoom is shit as it is. At least brave is FOSS and webrtc is an open standard. You can use the service without brave itself. But whatever let’s all knee jerk react and downvote. I’m simply stating information, it is factual I’m not holding a gun to your head to use it and I dont care if you do.
My huge corporation banned us from ever using it ever. They were iffy on it before, so previously we were only allowed to use it if we don’t handle any sensitive data, but now we aren’t allowed even have it be installed, they don’t trust any of it
I use Jitsi professionally. Never had a problem. I send a link over and they hop on via the web interface and get it working quickly without prior knowledge of the platform. Oh ya, minor detail: it’s FOSS.
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