Hello #fediverse,
we are #Senfcall and we are #hosting #privacy-friendly #BigBlueButton #videoconferences.
Free as in #freedom AND #free as in beer. (donations are welcome)
You don't even have to register an account (unless you need persistent rooms). Just visit https://senfcall.de/en/ - klick on "start meeting", enter meeting name (password optional), press "start" enter your name and have fun senfing. The call-invite link you find at the top of the chat.
@senfcall why senf? Mustard? I don't get it. 🤔 Lovely initiative!!!
@wendy there is a german saying that's called "seinen senf dazu geben" (adding your mustard). It means somebody shares an opinion in third-party conversation, usually without being asked.
We created Senfcall because we were forced to use unethical videoconference tools, without being asked and wanted to show that there's a different way.
@senfcall hey, we ( @domainepublic @nurpa @constant and more) are working on making #BigBlueButton more available for more Belgian organisations. How do you manage to keep the openness? BBB is quite resource hungry..
@wendy in production, BBB tends to be a bit less or equally resource hungry than Jitsi, once you set it up with settings that are optimized for your use case.
@basisbit hi, thanks for your answer. Are there examples online for optimal configuration of your #BigBlueButton server? I know there is a thing as a search engine 😉 but as self-hosters it would be great to have some really good example configs, reduce energy use, limit bandwidth and optimisation of speech quality!
@wendy mainly the things that @basisbit said. The best starting point is the #BigBlueButton documentation, where you find most of the necessary recommendations:
https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/support/faq.html
There are also some google groups mailing lists for community support: https://bigbluebutton.org/support/community/
That's mostly what we are using, basisbit might have further recommendations. For german speakers there is also the #divoc-meeting every monday: https://di.c3voc.de/user:bigbluebutton
@wendy sorry, but for hosting a video conferencing service like BBB, you'll have to read lots of documentation and know what your requirements are. I'd suggest you to start small and then grow your user base.
How many concurrent users and how many concurrent sessions do you expect? On average how many people with webcam enabled per meeting?
@wendy stuff you definitely should read:
https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/admin/privacy.html
https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/2.2/setup-turn-server.html
https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/admin/monitoring.html
https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/support/faq.html
https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/2.2/install.html#installation-choices
https://groups.google.com/g/bigbluebutton-setup/c/3Y7VBllwpX0/
@wendy @senfcall @domainepublic @nurpa @constant choose hardware that brings the best concurrent users / server-cost ratio, rent dedicated servers with current AMD Ryzen CPUs at a big datacenter provider like Hetzner, rent lots of dedicated servers, automate everything, use Ansible.