Jitsi limits calls to 95 min

General
1

They shared a very short blog post about it last week Friday, with no explanation.

Starting today, meetings on meet.jit.si are limited to 95 minutes.

More changes are coming, stay tuned!

This is very disappointing. I found out about it while I was in the Jitsi meeting. A couple of months ago, I started using Jitsi for the first time, because I was invited to multiple meetings hosted there by a small organization, and I was very impressed by it. In fact, I was so impressed that I was planning to make a glowing post about it here. However, one day, in the middle of one of our meetings, we realized that we had a 95 min timer, which is the new limitation Jitsi introduced.

What I loved about Jitsi, is that it doesn’t require that any of the guests use the app. It’s also far less buggy than Brave Talk, with which I’ve had few good experiences with. I also loved that unlike Proton Meet, Jitsi didn’t seem to have severe limitations. Now that is no longer true.

I’m guessing there will be an explanation for it coming soon, but again, this is frustrating and smells a lot like enshittification.

2

I’m not sure if it’s enshittification so much as just their public instance capping length, which I can’t really blame them for as it’s free. I bet you’d be free to self-host your own instance and remove that limit.

2 Likes
3

I think Jitsis failure is that E2EE was not part of the initial implementation. Can it work with their current implementation? Possibly, but they’ve gotta work to be backwards compatible, and tacking E2EE and can be disabled is not a secure by default standpoint.

4

I think you may be right. I’m waiting to see what explanation Jitsi gives for this change.
Someone told me that there is another instance called Open Use, that is free and has no limits, so that’s good. I hope Jitsi doesn’t try to limit other instances.

I hope they implement E2EE by default eventually, but right now Jitsi a better free alternative than Brave Talk or Proton Meet. At least for me.