Going by @wouter’s post from 2022, it was a totally separate Greenlight instance:
Socialcoop has been paying ~£1k/year since 2021 for this kind of meetcoop membership – this is just under 10% of our annual income.
Now that the dust is settling on the new servers (well done @kawaiipunk and everyone else involved), can we start a discussion about whether and how to reinstate service for Socialcoop members?
I don’t personally care whether we keep the vanity URL (or a separate Greenlight instance more generally); IMO the Socialcoop Community Working Group just needs some way of giving Socialcoop members access to Meetcoop services. One idea (only about the “how”, not the “whether” or “when”) could be to add https://auth.social.coop as a login provider on https://sso.meet.coop.
As I mentioned in the call on Friday, there are some (polite, comradely) grumblings from Socialcoop members about how much we’re paying compared to e.g. our Mayfirst membership, or our “community contributions” to other groups, when the service isn’t working – I think having an answer about whether and when Socialcoop members might be able to use the service again might increase people’s patience, or at least help members make an informed decision about whether to keep making paying for this multi-user membership.
The current blocker for me and @spacehobo is the lack of the access to Keycloak master realm.
We currently don’t understand how social.coop members were able to auth to the old BBB/Greenlight servers. If it was a separate BBB/Greenlight instance, we never knew that. Any info from social.coop side collective memory would be really useful e.g.
what URL did u login at?
what was the URL of the server you used?
how did you manage users?
did you manage users using Keycloak?
If there was a realm dedicated to social.coop members, how were new members added? It wasn’t linked to the OpenCollective sync script which just syncs the general list of paying OC members.
Note that I did send this email to tech.group@social.coop on 2026-02-23 but didn’t get a reply:
I was just wondering if we could come up with a plan with restoring meet.coop access to social.coop folks.
Because our lack of access to what we need to, we can’t see how the social.coop was set-up.
We were under the impression that all meet.coop Single Sign On (SSO) was a flat hierarchy with all OpenCollective active members synced to a general “members” role on Keycloak (the SSO provider).
However the fact that social.coop users aren’t able to access meet.coop suggests that this isn’t the case.
Could you possibly lay out how you used to access meet.coop…
Did you have a single account to create rooms via?
Was it certain emails that had accounts?
Or maybe anyone with a @social.coopsocial.coop email
We see your OpenCollective membership as a “Multi-user Member -Unlimited user accounts, Maximum of 100 meeting participants (minimum 3 months subscription)”
Just fyi no one else from that tier has contacted us and said they had problems. Not sure if this indicated they had access in a different way or not.
Anything you can give us here will help us work out how the old system was working as sadly many past meet.coop technical folks are not around.
We can create you a new account on meet.coop now as we have some Keycloak access, would you be ok with a shared account for the time being?
Me and @spacehobo are currently in the process of migrating the old sso.meet.coop Keycloak to a new and supported version login.meet.coop. That will give us the ability to create a realm for social.coop members to self manage their users.
A interim solution is that you all share a single de.meet.coop login. That is really quick to setup for us but it means there is less privacy of the shared login (i.e. you can see the rooms that others who share the login have created).
@spacehobo just did some digging and we don’t see any other realms apart from the “master” realm (which we can’t access) and the OC synced “meet.coop. realm.
So we can conclude that most likely social.coop had a totally separate BBB/Greenlight install that must have been on the servers that we locked down.
Would you like us to setup a shared users for you to fill the gap?
We hope to have the next Keycloak server deployed with 1-2 weeks and after that we can create you folks your own social.coop realm and you can manage your own users again?
Enter the email address(es) of the social.coop member who needs an account.
Check the “Invited” tab to confirm that they’ve been invited.
No.
If it’s easy, I think this would be a fine short-term measure so at least Socialcoop users can do “something”. But yes the lack of isolation is a bit non-ideal.
Seems like adding https://auth.social.coop as an “Identity provider” on the Meetcoop Keycloak might be less work for everyone? This didn’t exist when we first became Meetcoop members, otherwise I think we might have done that in the first place.
I had paused Social.coop’s monthly contributions prior to this news. On behalf of our Finance Working Group, I’d like to propose that socialcoop resume monthly Open Collective contributions to meet-coop after a 4 month pause, on October 1, 2026.
socialcoop’s last monthly payment was May 1, 2026.
socialcoop.meet.coop went down over 6 months ago.
4 months (90 GBP × 4) is equal to one of the 10 community contributions Social.coop made in 2025
We want to be equitable in our contributions and need to maintain oversight. Social.coop should resume on an equitable basis, but I’d like this to be “cooperation among cooperatives” and not a contractual dispute. Resuming in 4 months seems like the right approach, but we’d like to be transparent with and hear from other Meet.coop members.
I am speaking on a personal capacity here and not on behalf of the ad-hoc committee of me, @spacehobo@Graham@da5nsy and @3wc that is currently administrating meet.coop.
I personally think it is a bad move for social.coop to not pay their dues. I totally emphasise with your folks’ reasoning, it make sense.
However meet.coop is not in a good financial position right now, the co-op has had to pay a lot of money to me and @spacehobo to carry extremely challenging technical work to revive the outdated and unmaintained meet.coop infra with no documentation technical handover from previous technical volunteers and we still haven’t been given access to the old ca.meet.coop.
ColloCall, the co-op we have been working with still haven’t put their invoices in to the OpenCollective for hosting and support. I don’t have the exact figure but all this spending will eat into the co-op’s reserves significantly.
The committee suspect that meet.coop will need to urgently seek new customers to balance income/expenditure over the next year. This will be very challenging as is a cold start after not being active as a co-operative for many years and all work outside of the technical work being voluntary afaik.
I would argue that Social.coop’s decision will exacerbate meet.coop’s financial situation more and although it’s not a huge amount of money (360 GBP), it adds extra stress to the volunteers and contractors who are trying to re-invigorate this platform co-op after years of neglect after previous volunteers were unavailable (for whatever reason).
In my opinion, it would be most solidaristic for social.coop to pay the dues, despite meet.coop being less technically or socially functional during to those 6 months. The social.coopopencollective has 29,187.37 GBP at time of writing. I think you folks can easily afford it. Please don’t punish us for having structural issues.
Just a sidenote but jitsi.meet.coop has been available the entire time.
I was taken aback by your comment that I’m out to “punish” anyone.
I was excited to see our recent collaboration and want to see it succeed. In April, I wrote that the most tangible near-term benefit of Social.coop SSO would be access to Meet.coop on a new or restructured instance. git.coop/andrewe/social.coop-docs
My role is oversight of contributions, expenses, and stipends; ensuring they are equitable, reasonable, and fair. I am trying to balance a few things here on behalf of our Finance Working Group:
The original member proposal to join on an interim basis was time-limited in November 2020 and not reaffirmed in March 2021, but monthly contributions have remained automatic (6K GBP).
Social.coop approved an annual contribution up to 1,080 GBP (90 GBP × 12), hoping that service would resume.
The annual budget notes that we are “working with Meet.coop to resume our services” and that “we may spend less than this budgeted amount in 2026.”
Both collectives have reserve funds (Social.coop 29K GBP, Meet.coop 15K GBP) but each has their own set of challenges too.