In a group video chat, it sometimes is useful to “take somebody aside” and talk with them one to one, out of sight and earshot of the main group. For example, a group video session might be in progress when somebody new arrives late. The late arrival might benefit from a quick Q&A, though the rest of the meeting would prefer to continue with their discussion.
As far as I know, “taking somebody aside” isn’t supported yet by Jitsi. I hope Jitsi support this feature. One way it might be achieved is by clicking on the new arrival, and then having a link appear that would open a new tab for the two of you, muting the mic on the original tab, and then having audio and video working in the new, private one.
This is similar to Breakout Rooms in Zoom. There you can create a number of sub-rooms and assign people to those rooms, for example if you want students to work out some problem in smaller groups and then get back together a few minutes later.
I just mentioned this in the Breakout rooms thread: Breakout Rooms?
This is the text from that thread (honestly it’s more appropriate here than in the other thread though it’s related):
In a large gathering, it’s impossible for multiple people to have more than one conversation at once. For example, in a large group where one person wants to ask another person something and they are not comfortable using the text chat feature. Think of using Jitsi for a shared remote dinner party. Very common with people who can’t touch-type or are non-technical. I have this idea of wanting to select someone (or maybe multi-select a subset of participants) and then talk to them briefly which attenuates the rest of the meeting for them while focusing them momentarily on me (“push-to-over-talk”?). Very much like as if you spoke to the person sitting next to you in a room full of people. This isn’t a breakout room. This is like a quick way to have a side meeting within a meeting without leaving the meeting. You can say it’s rude but it always happens! When you have a large meeting, raising your hand to stop the meeting just to say something to someone else doesn’t work.