I wonder if you could get more reliable performance by planning a more centralized location. My book club uses the main jitsi site and it works well all things considered, but it's not perfect by any means. We've got people in several US and EU time zones showing up with varying internet connection qualities, so it's a difficult case.

But hey, it's free. And it hits the most important consideration: it could not be easier to use. That's pretty critical since my club mates don't have much capacity for troubleshooting.

That misses the whole point of this post. You may as well suggest using Zoom.

This is so wrong it hurts. Can't think of a better gap between theory and reality.

(I.e., there is no universe in which Jitsi's possible/likely abuse of this data is remotely close to Zoom's)

I'm thinking in on or off, yes or no, 1 or 0 here. The post is clearly about self hosting. So I'm not wrong at all :)

You're technically, and also pointlessly, correct.

Zoom costs money beyond 40 mins, unlike Jitsi. It also doesn't require anyone to have an account, or to install any software. These are key differentiators in my book!

Jitsi is footing the bill if you use the hosted product. If you don't want it to shut down or become expensive, you need to take a look at how the server is being run.

With self-hosted, you're simply paying for the servers. If you can pay for the servers and maintain them, you can be confident they'll stay up.

The hosted product is great, it just seems separate and off topic to me.