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Mozilla IT

Mozilla Eyes Decentralized Web-Based Videoconferencing Platform 'Meething' (zdnet.com) 40

Posted by EditorDavid from the ok-Zoomer dept.
Last month Techcrunch reported that Mozilla had gone "full incubator" by holding a startup lab called Fix the Internet, followed by "a formal program dangling $75,000 investments in front of early-stage companies..."

Fix the Internet had many key themes, including collaboration and decentralization (as well as user-controlled data and privacy-protecting social networks). That event "drew the interest of some 1,500 people in 520 projects, and 25 were chosen to receive the full package and stipend during the development of their minimum viable product (MVP). Below that, as far as pecuniary commitment goes, is the 'MVP Lab,' similar to the spring program but offering a total of $16,000 per team."

And one of those MVP Lab teams is Meething, a new video conferencing and collaboration platform from the innovation lab ERA. Meething "aims to be more secure than existing video conferencing tools and run on a decentralized database engine and leverage peer-to-peer networking" according to ZDNet.

In their video interview with CEO Mark Nadal, he outlined the following selling points:
  • Browser based video conferencing gives customers better options for security as well as branding.
  • Open source architecture is a win and the peer-to-peer networking is more efficient on compute costs.
  • Meething doesn't require downloads or apps that increase the security attack surface.

    The total addressable market for video conferencing is large and can support multiple players.

Their press release quotes Mark Mayo, a former Chief Product Officer at Mozilla who served as Meething's mentor, arguing that video conferencing on the web "has long promised to enable a whole new world of online collaboration. Frankly, it hasn't delivered. It's been way too hard to build cool products with video and Meething aims to be the zero-barrier-to-entry platform that realizes this future. Soon, video conferencing won't suck!"


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Mozilla Eyes Decentralized Web-Based Videoconferencing Platform 'Meething' More

Mozilla Eyes Decentralized Web-Based Videoconferencing Platform 'Meething'

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  • Where you have talkth and gather learningth?

  • Web-Based Videoconferencing Platform 'Meething'

    Not to be confused with the new veggie burgers, "Meathing".

    [ s/veggie burgers/male porn star/ ]

  • This has to be the worst fucking name for a product. Some asshole collects a paycheck for this? Hey Mozilla or Mozi//a@ whatever you're called now. Are you rendering faster than Chrome? How about security, do you sandbox processes? What you're working on being the google+ of video conferencing? Hey whatever floats your boat.

    • Look, it's hard to beat Microsoft Bob for worst product name.

    • if you look at it, it appears to be a multi-user version of peerjs.

      Not quite what you were expecting I think, that it also comes with a distributed DB so you can do meeting things with strangers is a bonus. Or something, but Mozilla isn't turning into Zoom, more like playing with new tech toys to give us all something useful. Check the github source out.

    • This has to be the worst fucking name for a product.

      Surely it doesn't reach the brilliance of i.Beat blaxx?

  • Decentralised and P2P. How will the authorities get access?

  • All three were promised back in the 70s to be gotten by the year 2000, and we still don't have those technologies. Prospects don't appear hopeful either.

  • "Meething doesn't require downloads or apps that increase the security attack surface."

    No, it just requires that you give your web browser unfettered access to your computer hardware, potentially opening your computer up to the rest of the world.

    I'd rather have a single-purpose app.

  • Good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pascal Sartoretti ( 454385 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @04:09PM (#60157070)
    I guess many people will complain that Mozilla is again losing its focus, but I don't agree : we need an agnostic web conferencing platform. I don't want to be tied to Skype, Zoom, WebEx, etc...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      I guess many people will complain that Mozilla is again losing its focus, but I don't agree : we need an agnostic web conferencing platform. I don't want to be tied to Skype, Zoom, WebEx, etc...

      The problem is that you don't get rid of a platform until everyone you talk to drops it. After WebEx refused to work with the company laptops we're now down to two, Skype for business and Teams depending on who we're collaborating with. Then again, at home we did drop Skype for Discord for audio chats so... if it works well, it's not like we have any loyalty. That's the one good thing about video conferencing, there's no real penalty to switching.

    • I disagree- we don't need an agnostic web conferencing platform- we need an agnostic web conferencing *standard* and we already have that with WebRTC. There's no reason you can't build interoperability between multiple webRTC platforms, similar to how XMPP bridged the gap amongst a myriad of chat solutions earlier.

      • I disagree- we don't need an agnostic web conferencing platform- we need an agnostic web conferencing *standard* and we already have that with WebRTC. There's no reason you can't build interoperability between multiple webRTC platforms, similar to how XMPP bridged the gap amongst a myriad of chat solutions earlier.

        My (possibly incorrect) understanding of WebRTC is that it is the protocol between clients doing conferencing (and I assume that Mozilla will use it instead of reinventing the wheel).

        But above WebRTC, I guess you need something for participants to discover each other, plus some minimal features like chat, etc... Isn't it ?

  • Good idea but fix video meetings first (Score:3)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @04:18PM (#60157094)

    I'm not a big fan of online meetings. I know it's the best we have right now but I'm getting really tired of seeing barely-HD badly-lit postage stamp sized windows of people all replicating everything bad with traditional meetings, while throwing this bizarro-world meeting-in-my-bedroom or meeting-behind-my-carefully-curated-bookshelf thing on top of it.

    That said, if there's a way to prevent Microsoft or Zoom or Cisco or Citrix from cornering the conferencing market, go for it. It's unfortunate that Zoom wound up being the default choice because they had a free tier right off the bat and people just cobbled things together within a week. If we end up having to do this long-term, we have to figure out a way to prevent one company from monopolizing all communication as a layer on top of ISPs.

  • I know itâ(TM)s all about privacy these days. But one of the use cases should be logging in with your eID. Online meeting with your government service or doctor or teacher would be benefit from a trusted id

  • I totally agree that video conferencing is disappointingly pushed toward half-assed centralized services, and I'm glad to see that Mozilla is supporting a project to make it more open and decentralized. But I'd like to know, what other projects are they working on? Because personally, I don't think that video conferencing is the big glaring problem.

    To me, the big glaring problem is text messaging. And no, I don't mean "text messaging" like mobile text messaging, like SMS. I mean the broader category of

  • I don't care if it's "decentralized" or if FBI can listen in. What I do care about is that in all these tools without a single exception both audio and video suck ass so bad, I dread even launching them, and will do my best to not use them after the lockdowns are over. I believe these problems are technically solvable with today's technology. Instead we get this "decentralized" bullshit again.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by higuita ( 129722 )

      First, just because you do not care about privacy, doesn't mean that everyone thinks the same!

      Second, audio is good in platforms i use (google meet, whereby.com, meet.jit.si, discord and mumble) in almost all network speeds.
      Most audio problems i see are mic setup/config, like hardware muted, volume/gain too high/low and feedback noise. Only this last one can be really workaround in software and
      is done in many places.

      Video is harder, it requires more bandwidth, that not all people have.
      People usually f

  • Does anyone remember Firefox Hello? It was a very functional WebRTC video conference functionality builtin to Firefox; it was my preferred way of doing video meetings, until they abandoned because nobody was using it, Google Hangouts and Skype were already too entrenched...

  • Multicast (Score:3)

    by michael_cain ( 66650 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @06:39PM (#60157506) Journal
    Something over 25 years ago I was doing research versions of real-time multi-party multi-media conferencing over TCP/IP. (The video was truly ugly, but it ran at 15 frames-per-second and you could tell that it was synched with the audio.) Strong encryption and IP multicast was the easy way to go.

    Failure to get the big telecom I worked for to turn on multicast at least for its customers was one of the big failures of my technical career.

  • You are bottlenecked by the lowest-speed connections, and if you want to do serious things like sharing screens with any decent resolution and framerate, you're going to eat up a TON of bandwidth and processing power compressing and routing those videos everywhere and ensuring sync.

    As always, Camfrog demonstrates the proper way to do video chat. Single server with maybe a secondary cloud backup running, and the server only sends out video streams of the video streams you choose to watch. Even the web versio

  • ... called NAT.

    And I think that most NATers have cleverly defeated the old Skyp peer-to-peer tricks, but is that so? For domestic routers?

  • Why would anyone want video conferencing is beyond my comprehension. There is no useful purpose to the technology whatsoever.

    Y'all should "Touch Woody, the Internet Pecker". Somehow that product logo didn't go over very well either ...

  • So, are we about to hear Beethoven's 5th farted out?

  • I think Jitsi Meet [meet.jit.si] is easy to use and would be a good starting point for the Meething. Mozilla does not need to reinvent what is already out there.
  • What will this project do that Jitsi doesn't?

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