Digital infrastructure/protocol

A recent fediverse comment here on Big Blue Button - heavy duty to set up, but good when it's ready?

We had Big Blue Button running for a while as part of our systems at the Digital Life Collective. I used it a little bit. I think we stopped using it simply because the bulk of the video-conferencing had always used Zoom so weaning people off that onto BBB was a challenge.

Have DigitalLife folks used jitsi? It lacks the large-scale conference facilities of Zoom (recording, webinar mode, breakouts, perhaps degrades with scale) but seems quite adequate for ordinary size meetings.

To me, jitsi feels kind-of like the etherpad of video chat. Plain vanilla. Plug and go.

Jitsi does recording. https://jitsi.org/blog/learn-how-to-live-stream-and-record-on-your-jitsi-meet-install/

We've done it often.

Does Zoom offer breakouts? They are a feature of https://unhangout.media.mit.edu/ which is open source (as is jitsi).

@Bob Haugen Thanks for this link to the jitsi recording tutorial. However, that's server setup, for someone (like Mikorizal?) who has their own jitsi instance. AFAIK there's isn't a public instance of jitsi that offers recording, out of the box.

We don't host our own instance, but have no problem recording. See attached screenshot.

Ah, that's clear, thanks. Some instances of jitsi have recording (and livestream), and some don't. meet.jit.si does. meet.collective.tools doesn't.

I've installed Jitsi on one of my servers but I need to start again for one very simple reason - their installation scripts expect (and require) /etc/hostname to contain the FQDN rather than just the hostname, which goes entirely against Debian/Ubuntu requirements and messes up other services quite badly. My attempts to correct the configuration in retrospect (after having installed while /etc/hostname contained only the hostname - as it should) resulted in a curious looping effect. I've written a small script which I hope will overcome this problem, but haven't had a chance to try it yet.

Perhaps Jitsi's developers assume it will always be installed in its own dedicated virtual server (which with Cloudron is not just an expectation but a requirement).

meet.mayfirst.org offers recording and livestream. Have not tried either, but at least they are on the menu.

Seems to me, the Cloudron stack is more ‘free software’ in orientation and culture, than the Nextcloud stack, which is pretty corporate-security, closed community oriented (even tho they provide community accounts). Do we have a basic style/culture hunch about this? Are we gathering together Cloudron people, or Nextcloud people?

In the NextCloud stack, the docs writing tool is OnlyOffice. Document filing is corporate standard. Chats and even workflows are inbuilt. But would we consider running an instance of NextCluld?  And do we want a corporate infrastructure designed for ‘fully on-site operation secure against data leaks’?

However . . . the collective.tools organisers’ toolkit platform venture in Sweden is implementing NextCloud in a community-oriented package https://collective.tools/features.html#collaborate. Personally I would be inclined to trust ‘the feel’ of this, as a non-corporate assembly of tools. But the text chat enviironment here is the Slackish Rocket.chat. @Oli SB and @Graham aren’t excited by this. Dunno about @Bob Haugen ?  So a question . . . is the community we want to build, going to be self-disciplined enough to settle into a simple ontology of internal groupings, that can be cleanly implemented in a ‘team based’ environment like Rocket/Slack? the DisCOs use Slack. But they’re a tight knit collection of well defined teams.

Again the question - is it social media the community needs? Or within-project collaboration?