Virtual HWC

Virtual HWC is an online Homebrew Website Club for IndieWebbers who either can’t make a regular meeting or don’t yet have critical mass to host one in their area.

The first virtual meet-up was organised by Chris Aldrich and David Shanske on December 14, 2016 on Pacific Time. On May 31, 2017, another virtual meet-up was organised by Jeena Paradies, Martijn van der Ven, and Peter Molnar for people on Central European Time.

The virtual meet-up on Central European Time is a regular event every two weeks, currently hosted on Sven Knebel’s Mumble server.

software

Below are some services/software that have been used (or are considered) for virtual meet-ups. Please contribute if you have positive or negative experiences with any of these!

Zoom

Main article: Zoom

As of early 2020, most IndieWeb events are using Zoom. The community maintains a shared paid account that can easily add additional accounts for multiple simultaneous meetings or camps as necessary.

appear.in

No longer offers video conferencing since at least 2019-12-14 (archived)

Due to trademark infringement of our property, the video conferencing previously offered on this site is no longer available.

appear.in has been used for vHWC Europe.

Looks extremely similar to Talky in both features and technology.

Pros

• Works directly from modern browsers without set-up (through WebRTC).
• Ability to share your screen for demos.

Cons

• P2P technology means relatively high data usage.
• issues with only partial connections especially with many participants.
• requires (free) sign up for room creator

Google Hangouts

Hangouts was used for the virtual meet-ups on Pacific Time.

Pros

• Hangouts On Air allows streaming the meet-up to YouTube, creating an archive.

Cons

• Requires the use of Google Accounts. (this requirement is supposed to have been dropped, need to test this to make sure)

Talky

Talky was used for the virtual meet-ups on Central European Time.

Pros

• Works directly from modern browsers without set-up (through WebRTC).
• Ability to share your screen for demos.

Cons

• P2P technology means relatively high data usage (according to Martijn van der Ven it is worse than other WebRTC things)

Mumble

Mumble is being used for virtual meet-ups.

Pros

• Native clients available for most systems.
• Very low data usage.
• Third-party browser client available.

Cons

• Audio only. No webcam or stream sharing.
• Requires a server hosted or rented by the organiser.

Notes

• Jonas Herzig’s open-source mumble-web can be used in a browser, taking away the need for native clients. It requires a custom proxy in front of the mumble server set-up and will thus not work with all servers out-of-the-box.
• GuildBit offers free temporary servers on demand, with a choice of region, and might be a good option for impromptu meet-ups.

Discord

Discord is being looked into as a viable platform for future virtual meet-ups.

Pros

• Both native and web clients available.
• Useable without registering an account beforehand.

Cons

• Audio only. No webcam or screen sharing.
• Creates a Slack like environment with multiple text and audio rooms that need navigating.

Notes

• Video and screen sharing is in beta as of 2017-8-10: https://medium.com/@discordnelly/were-testing-video-chat-and-screen-share-with-5-of-players-today-c8ddb108ca31

Jitsi Meet

Self-Hosted

Tested on Eddie’s server on AWS using a t3.small server from EC2 for vHWC Americas on 2019-02-20.

Pros

• Useable without registering an account beforehand.
• video
• screen share
• some control over video bandwidth
• can stream to youtube, but caveat: can't control who's shown on screen, always talking user (bad when e.g. screensharing a demo) - manual streaming might be preferable
• had 6 people on the call at one time and didn’t notice any server issues.

Cons

• Manual setup for extras like recording or call-in features

Hosted Service

https://meet.jit.si/ - tested at vHWC EU 2019-02-06. open source, appears fairly easy to setup own server if so desired (untested!)

Pros

• Useable without registering an account beforehand.
• video
• phone call-in on hosted instance
• screen share
• some control over video bandwidth
• can stream to youtube, but caveat: can't control who's shown on screen, always talking user (bad when e.g. screensharing a demo) - manual streaming might be preferable

Cons

• video issues: people not seeing each other, screen shares not visible to all (audio fine!)
• phone call in shows number to participants
• Sven Knebel had issues reconnecting after drops and weird sync-issues of names etc
• During HWC Americas it kept disconnecting us. Occasionally we couldn’t hear each other. We were split across 2 servers (US East and US West).

Software to Test

Microsoft Teams

• Microsoft Teams

Google Meet

• Google Meet is a successor to Hangouts that was released in Spring 2020.

See Also

• events
• remote participation