With all of the flaws of Zoom coming to light, now is a good time to experiment with other services. Jitsi Meet may not be well known, but it offers unique security and privacy protections, while remaining at least as user-friendly as Zoom. Better yet, it is completely open source and free to use without any registration or login. If you are comfortable setting up your own server, you can even host your own instance of the software.
Tips for utilizing Jitsi Meet
Without hosting your own version, there are a couple ways to get the most out of Jitsi:
Only create a meeting just before you need it
Much like a temporary code you receive for any 2 factor authentication, a last minute meeting prevents people from exploiting information from past meetings.
Add a unique aspect to the randomly generated meetings
While the random 4 word generator is convenient, an attacker could guess names as with zoom numbers, although not quite as easily. For the host, it would be most convenient to create a password after using the randomly named meeting. Keep in mind, If you start a meeting and set a password, it will be reset when everyone leaves.
For attendees, it would be more convenient to take the random words and add some extra content. Say you start with PurpleMonkeyDishwasherFree. You could Tweak the words to PuurpleMunkeyDishwashenFreee; or add random alphanumerics, Pur4pleMonk5eyDishrwasherFgree.
Create a Live Stream for those who don’t need to fully participate
While you can allow a large audience to join a Jitsi meeting, it offers little benefit to those who only want to watch/listen. In their case, it would be best to use the built-in support for live streaming to Youtube:
If you open the full embedded video in YouTube you can see that live stream viewers are also able to discuss using YouTube’s Live Chat:
You don’t have to allow chat, but it’s a convenient way to allow broader audience participation without much effort or risk.