Are you offering to pay for them to host their own streaming solution and volunteering to handle technical support for users who have trouble with it?
This gotcha-game is tiring. People don't have to like Amazon to realize that they and YouTube are the only practical game in town for free live streaming.
Debian manages to do global streaming for DebConf every year using only libre software and VMs running Debian at cloud providers. Seems like this is their setup using ansible:
DebConf does host their own HLS streams. (They use video.js, which was started by the cofounders of my former employer Mux; I'm pretty familiar with it.)
I don't intend to suggest that it's impossible by any means; I've done it recently for a project of my own. But it's work, and it's expensive work, and it becomes a question of quality of experience. They make compromises to do their own hosting; bandwidth is always a little bit scarce and DebConf's live streams are 2Mbps @ 720p as a max rendition. For their audience, that might be fine. For others, it's not, and a good way to drive viewers away. I don't have an intuition as to whether the EFF's target audience feels that way, but their overlap with the free-software set isn't complete and wanting their live streams to look roughly competitive with everybody else's isn't unreasonable; how you look and the reliability/QoE of your stream does impact credibility.
The second tine of the fork is user accessibility. "It's just Twitch, everybody uses this" is a powerful argument for that accessibility if, unlike DebConf, you can't reasonably expect everybody to read a man page if there are problems.
Hmm, my memory tells me there was just a web page you could visit to watch them, plus links if you wanted to watch in an external media player. Post-conference you can look through the schedule to watch individual talks.
"Online gatherings" as in 1:M live streams, or "online gatherings" as in "pack everyone into a WebRTC room and hope it holds"? Because Twitch and YouTube do the former and I don't see anything in BBB that natively emits HLS or DASH. I see plugins that will talk to an RTMP server, but that leaves a very long row to hoe.
1:M live streaming is very, very difficult to get right--it's is why video providers can charge so much for private video in the first place.
Its not really the streaming persay its this is TV broadcast tech running over IP.
Its a networking problem, not a software issue. You will have to change the format or be independently wealthy to compete, 1:M will always by nature be a matter of outsized resources on the transmit versus receive side.
It's one of the reasons why these days I'm bearish on the future of independently-run video. The numbers are aggressively bad. People use YouTube and Twitch because they have to, not because they want to.
It works relatively well on a beefy BBB instance. Jitsi from my experience craps out on low-bandwidth scenarios, but I've attended BBB meetings of respectable size with no issue.
WebRTC as currently implemented has very hard and by its nature has very low audience caps. There's a reason why WebRTC-to-HLS gateways exist; WebRTC by itself isn't substitutable, and if you're going to act like this I'd think there's a pretty significant onus upon you to provide something substitutable.
The substitutable thing is "another content provider that does HLS or equivalent", and we're back where we started, because doing so independently, as discussed in another subthread, either costs a lot of money or comes with compromising tradeoffs, as well as a support burden that somebody has to pay for and do.
Independent web video is mostly awful. The best answers are bad ones. Sorry.
This gotcha-game is tiring. People don't have to like Amazon to realize that they and YouTube are the only practical game in town for free live streaming.