Jitsi meet instance running on cheap VPS saves me tons of headaches. My country is adopting censorship/monitoring/firewall restrictions akin to China and Iran. Half of services work with VPN for other half you have to disable it.
Jitsi instance is working all the time and ready to connect 24/7.
I wanted to do this but I found it hard to secure it in a way that anyone can join meeting links I send but I'm the only one who can create meetings. It seems like Jitsi intentionally makes this hard so that you buy their hosted plan instead. Have you found a good solution?
Authentication and securing meetings is a point of friction in Jitsi. I wouldn't go that far to call it intentional. But if it is - I'm okay with that. Since it's open-source, somebody have to make money to keep developing software and pay bills at the same time.
On many occasions I found it annoying that auth cookies expire after a day or less. And the most confusing thing for me is that it doesn't work well with 1Password, so I had to type my passwords like a caveman.
I solved it in few ways:
* I added common rooms to the bookmarks so I can quickly host them
* I added another user for my partner so she can host meetings too.
* Since it's open source, I changed the code so that auth cookies stay active for 30 days, instead of 1 day.
* Just this morning I've been exploring mobile version of Jitsi meet, where you can click on room name in 'Recents' and join quicker. This is a win for non-technical members of our family.