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
1 Like
Jeez, sorry to hear the zoom experience - that sounds awful 
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
5 Likes
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.
1 Like
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 
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) . But looks good enough for now!
1 Like
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. .