If you want to go on a public server, make sure that it REALLY is located in the EU and that you can communicate to it directly.
Some providers tie a CDN in between you and the actual server, very often it is Cloudflare. That means while the server may be in the EU, the content delivery network is not, and as a US company Cloudfront cannot be GDPR compliant, because they are bound by the legal system of the United States - which means that without the need for a judge to decide upon the individual case governmental bodies can force Cloudfront with a “national security letter” to copy them ALL the data they have about you, and remain silent to you about that forever.
So be sure to check ANY public server that you want to use by geolocating it to rule out that maybe they have a US based CDN as a reverse proxy.
I did a setup on a VPS server ( 2 vCPU and 4 GB RAM with a lot of bandwidth ~15€/month: the operating system is Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit server and I used the installer bbb-install.sh ) and I used it for about 27 lessons.
The lessons had from 30 to 70 students: it went very well and I will use it again next year.
For schools, distance learning or lectures?
BBB is the best choice.
What did I like the most?
How the presentations are handled
The possibility of separate rooms to do revisions/work groups
Thanks @rickyx
We decided to use BBB too recently. We’ll use a public server funded through donations this weekend with probably a similar number of participants.
I hope it works well, because if it doesn’t we’ll switch to zoom again and I’ll be excluded. Anyway I’ll report back.
Then I also share a detail: few users, behind firewalls (in my opinion badly configured, it’s not a TURN problem) as in colleges or public buildings, could have technical problems to connect (as it happens also with other systems).
In this case you can suggest to use the mobile connection: it works very well! The bandwidth for a listener is minimal and doesn’t drain all the data credit.
Up to now. https://jitsi.org/ seems to me the easy solution.
I had a trans-atlantic session with around 10 people and it was stable.
Of course self-hosting is always better, but almost nobody does that.
Regarding Jitsi: Note that Jitsi cannot do end-to-end encryption with more than 2 participants. Also, care must be taken when choosing the platform supplier (if not self-hosted). Many claim to be GDPR compliant, but a closer look at their term shows that they aren’t. Also, if using the app from Jitsi: Be sure to use only the F-Droid version. Because that has “only” one spying tool inside, the Playstore version has three… (That is because Google always adds two spywares of their own to ALL open source software in the Playstore…).
