Loomio

Community Update about Meet.Coop services for Social.Coop members

Melissa SantosMelissa Santos Wed 25 Mar 2026 2:44AMPublicSeen by 149

Social.Coop is a member of Meet.Coop, a cooperative-commons videoconferencing service.

In the past, this offering was limited to a Big Blue Button (BBB) instance, hosted by a Canadian cooperative, that Social.Coop members gained access to after completing a separate signup process. Then, two things happened:

  1. The Canadian BigBlueButton instance we were using was taken down for security concerns (October 2025)

  2. Meet.Coop made accessible a Jitsi Meet instance, available at https://Jitsi.Meet.Coop, for members to use in lieu of the unavailable Big Blue Button while service was restored and potentially beyond (December 2025)

Note that for many people, Jitsi.Meet.Coop will be a better fit for virtual meetings, as it is a simpler experience and it does not currently require signup or login – please do use it for your personal virtual meeting needs if it fits! (I host a monthly craft club and book club on it, for example.)

Meet.Coop is now at the point where they are ready to provide again service using a Big Blue Button instance that we can use, but we are still working with them on setting up new users and recovering past meeting artifacts like recordings. They are also open to continuing to run Jitsi Meet in parallel for users and groups that prefer that, although this is not yet confirmed long term. I am posting this to let all our members know that these services are available, and in particular, to let interested parties know that if you need a Big Blue Button user or need past recordings recovered you should reach out to us.

Social.coop members are working with other meet.coop members to come to a good resolution.

Calls to Action:

  • Say something in the comments here if you need a user account on the new Big Blue Button server

  • Say something in the comments here if you need past recordings from the old Big Blue Button server

  • Use the jitsi.meet.coop server if it suits your needs!

You can always reach out to the email registrations@social.coop if you need to reach the Community Working Group to talk about this service or anything else!

mike_hales

mike_halesThu 26 Mar 2026 12:06PM

Commenting as a user... The BBB setup that has been used on the German server in recent weeks has some defaults that differ from the original ones on the Canadian and German servers (the set-up is by old meet. coop friends at Collocall 🙏). Notably, the fonts in the UI (including the Greenlight login app) are horribly small, mostly unredable for me, with a minor vision defect. Luckily my body-language remembers how the interface works! When the service is re-instated with a meet. coop setup I hope that more accessible defaults can be applied in the UI.