Gone are the days when remote work was seen as something extraordinary. I never had any doubts that remote work will prevail, but I’m not entirely sure if out infrastructure is ready for that transition. There are plenty of fundamental questions which haven’t been answered yet, such as: how should we communicate when we work remotely most of the time? Text is king, and we have some nice email and chat software. WhatsApp and Telegram need to go, but luckily we have Matrix, Signal and other trustworthy software that can be used by companies and individuals alike.

Text is essential, but our remote workflows also require some form of audio and video communication. I honestly don’t understand why, but Zoom seems to be the most popular choice when it comes to virtual meetings and even one-on-one calls. We can do much better than that, and, frankly, we absolutely should. People who’re willing to install non-auditable apps made by shady Chinese companies are either incompetent or naive.

That said, we really need to have an easy to use, open and auditable alternative to Zoom. Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Jitsi, so I decided to give it a go. Jitsi is an open source software which doesn’t even need to be installed because it’s a browser app. It has a ton of features and its user interface is pretty smooth and modern-looking.