Announcement: Edgeryders is leaving Zoom, effective immediately.

Yes. Please stop any public calls until we have sorted this out. Better to put everything on hold till we can ensure we have a safe setup.

Yep. I wouldn’t use this for group calls at the moment - the same risks apply (albeit a user needs an Edgeryders account, but pretty easy to create one).

Those features will be implemented, but my focus is on the webkit at the moment… until then consider it as safe as a basic open call.

Discord may serve the purpose for secure calls in the interim…

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We can also schedule calls and limit the call to RSVP’d members. This is the most secure way of using it.

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yes, verify then trust.

how?

A scheduled call needs a topic - like this: Virtual Shared Dinner

You need to add an event date and RSVP a list of users:

I was super busy on Monday @MariaEuler but I can walk through the steps and discuss the missing features with you tomorrow when you’re available!

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yes, let’s do that. Would be good to do that before the call with Federico, so how about between 14;00 and 15:00? (shorter if possible)

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that works fine, I’ll message you on riot a bit before.

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What we need to add for now.edgeryders befvore using it in bigger settings:

  • mute
  • remove
  • password option

What we have now:

  • RSVP option

Info:

  • screen sharing currently only works in chrome, not safari
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Hm, I haven’t seen that, cool!

@owen just coached me on it. Is easy to set up and we can use it to at least keep connected to those who are already showing up regularly while we set up security for the future option where people can join in from outside again.

You can just tick a box in the same thing where you add the calendar to a post to enable rsvp, then you add the edgeryders use names of those who want to join and after that, you create the room link with:
now.edgeryders.eu/call/the the number on the end of the post’s link address

for this one: xxhttps://edgeryders.eu/t/announcement-edgeryders-is-leaving-zoom-effective-immediately/13275 it would be 13275

now.edgeryders.eu/call/13275

also needs to be tagged as webcontent

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How close to ready are we with this setup?

the rsvp works already. The rest won’t happen until first halv of May

ok, so calls suspended until then or we go with what we have and take our chances?

we can use the rsvp set up to continue with the guests we know want to come, we wont be able to have people from outside join without talking to us first until early may

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Jeez, sorry to hear the zoom experience - that sounds awful :frowning:

It might be worth sharing what we’ve been doing in http://greening.digital, the company I set up a few months back, because it might be relevant when dealing with this problem.

We’ve been experimenting with using Big Blue Button for replacing zoom, and having some success, with running a 50EUR /month box on hetzner.

We hosted a community call for just under 70 ppl today for the first time, and it wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t too bad for a first call. XR use the same software for their video calls instead of zoom, or jitsi as well:

https://twitter.com/julian0liver/status/1248577811876425729

What you get

You get breakout rooms, recorded calls, a web based client that works with mobile and browsers, and it’s been in use for like… 10 years in academia, and commercially.

The entire stack is open source, and there’s a Ruby on Rails app called Greenlight, on the front-end that manages access to calls, which means it’s not super hard to customise for your needs.

You’re welcome to sign up below, on our instance to try it out (I’ll need to approve you before you can start calls tho):

https://meet.greening.digital/

If you already have familiarity with discourse, because that’s a rails app too, I’m pretty sure you can make discourse talk to the video server the way I think you are probably doing with http://now.edgeryders.org.

Hope you’re all well, and I’m happy to answer further qns about, as long as you don’t need them answered urgently.

Cx

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Awesome, thanks for sharing. I see other groups experimenting with BBB, and while it scales better/differently than jitsi (at the price of “serious” hardware demands), as far as I understand, with 70 people all participants will also need quite a nice internet connection to enjoy the experience. But I guess the usual meet-up is expected to have way less participants anyway. I’ll get in contact with you via PM.

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It’s also probable that most of Greening Digital community is quite well versed in all things digital, so they rely on good connections.
Thanks for the recommendation for BBB Chris!
Our largest group call was 40 people last week - but most of them are up to 12, so imagine :slight_smile:

For the technical interested (in German, but should be machine translatable, its server administrators writing there, not very poetic) a befriended hosting cooperation did some tests: Zoom Alternative BigBlueButton™ im Praxistest | Hostsharing eG – die Hosting-Genossenschaft . Their measurements also do imply (at least to me) that BBB is not MUCsing the video streams (or at least it is not as affective as assumed) :frowning: . But looks good enough for now!

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Something weird is happening with the Greenlight link on my system (not clickable). Its GitHub - bigbluebutton/greenlight: A really simple end-user interface for your BigBlueButton server. .