[HCoop-Discuss] Setting Up Jitsi Meet For the Coop?

[Clinton Ebadi]

Greetings,

Inspired by the FSF setting Jitsi Meet up for their members
(https://www.fsf.org/associate/about-the-fsf-jitsi-meet-server), I have
been thinking about whether HCoop should also set up an instance for
members as a useful service, especially during this pandemic.

I've created an informal week long poll to gauge interest:
https://members.hcoop.net/portal/poll?id=76 , please vote yes/no if you
would or would not have a use for Jitsi meet.

Jitsi Meet (https://meet.jit.si/) is a nice little webrtc video
conferencing platform; it doesn't have a ton of features, but it's very
easy to set up -- it took me a day to get a basic setup, and shouldn't
take much more effort to set up for HCoop if we set it up standalone on
a dedicated server (it relies on prosody xmpp and nginx, although we
*could* integrate it with ejabberd and apache, it is not officially
supported or documented). If we did so, every member would be able to
host meetings that the public-at-large could join.

For initial testing on my own digital ocean account, I've been using a 2
CPU / 2G RAM VPS which has been fine for small conferences; for the coop
setup we'd start with a basic 4 CPU / 8G RAM instance ($40 a month, well
within our current hosting budget), and scale from there as
needed[0]. We'd also make a few minor privacy enhancements in the config
like the FSF did: using our own STUN and TURN server and disabling
external API calls. I think we should leave the YouTube sharing
functionality enabled though, it's pretty useful albeit at the cost of
loading JavaScript from YouTube when videos are shared.

Bandwidth use is the only resource concern I have: a 3h meeting with
four participants all streaming peaks around 10Mbps outgoing and uses
around 13G of traffic. Incoming is usually slightly higher, but we don't
pay for incoming bandwidth. We have 25T of outgoing transfer quota (+
quota added by the new VPS) and use just ~400G/month, so I think we can
handle this, but it would definitely be something to keep an eye on
during the beta period. We should be fine for smaller conferences (< 30
people, we can also set a "lastN" config that allows an unlimited number
of participants, but stops the video relaying for all after N users have
joined) -- and Jitsi meet can broadcast to YouTube if someone wanted to
have a meeting with a few participants and a large number of watchers
(not ideal, because YouTube, but that's all it supports at the moment
for broadcasting).

Any thoughts? I think this would be a great service to try out, and if
it works well might be something someone would join the coop for, even
if they had no use for hosting/shell access.

If we use this to try and increase membership though, I think we'll want
to finally formally adopt a privacy policy that has been in limbo for
over a decade...[1] (in practice, admins will never look at your
communications and we respect privacy strictly, but actually adopting a
formal policy makes us look a lot better), since streams are briefly
unencrypted on the server (client <-> server is encrypted, but there's
no E2E client <-> client encryption yet).

If we moved forward with this, I would expect to be able to set it up
around September 12th.


[0] Really, we'd set up a 1CPU/2G RAM/50G storage VPS and then scale it
    up to the 4CPU/8G RAM VPS leaving the disk the same size; this way
    we'd have the option of moving to one of the performance optimized
    VMs later if it proves necessary (possible, if it ends up being a
    heavily used service). This is necessary as you can't scale disks
    down, and the performance optimized VPS have limited storage.

[1] https://wiki.hcoop.net/DraftPrivacyPolicy

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