[AMA] We're Framasoft, we develop PeerTube, ask us anything!
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Bonjour,
c/[email protected]!Framasoft (that's us!) is a small French non-profit (10 employees + 25 volunteers), that has been promoting Free-Libre software and its culture to a French-speaking audience for 20+ years.
What does Framasoft do?
We strongly believe that Free-Libre software is one of the essential tools for achieving a Free-Libre society. That is why we maintain and contribute to lots of projects that aim to empower people to get more freedom in their digital lives.
Among those tools are:
- 20 FOSS based web-services that we host (mainly for our French-speaking audience) on our Degooglify Internet website, including Framadate and Framaforms… ;
- many talks, workshops, and participations to conventions ;
- A blog, where we share our views and where a group of volunteers translate into French news from the English-speaking FLOSS world ;
- Many, many ressources to help people and organizations in their transition to ethical digital tools (guides, documentation, even card games!) ;
Framasoft is funded by donations (94% of our 2024 budget), mainly grassroots donations (75% of the 2024 budget). As we mainly communicate in French, the overwhelming majority of our donations comes from the French-speaking audience. You can help us through joinpeertube.org/contribute.
We develop PeerTube
In the English-speaking community, we are mostly known for developing PeerTube, a self-hosted video and live-streaming free/libre platform, which has become the main alternative to Big Tech's video platforms.
From a student project to a software with international reach, our video platform solution is now, seven years later, used and acknowledged by many institutions!
The last major version of PeerTube, v7, has been released at the end of 2024, along with the first version of the official mobile app, available on both Android (Play Store, F-Droid) and iOS.
Now that the PeerTube platform has matured significantly over successive versions, we believe that the way to enable even more people to use PeerTube is to improve the mobile app so that it can be carried around in people's pockets.
Ask Us Anything!
Last month, we have published the roadmap for the project. This week, we also launched our new crowdfunding campaign which focuses on our mobile app.
We want to give you the opportunity through this AMA to give us feedback on the product and the project and discuss the crowdfunding campaign and our next steps!If you have any questions, please ask them below (and upvote those you want us to answer first).
We will answer them to the best of our abilities with the
/u/Framasoftaccount, from May. 28th 2025 5pm CET (11 am EST) until we are too tired ;).EDIT (8:16 pm CET): This wraps it for the day, thanks for all of your questions and feedback!
Have you ever discussed about PeerTube with big creators of news videos, e.g. Euronews, France 24, DW, etc?
-
Bonjour,
c/[email protected]!Framasoft (that's us!) is a small French non-profit (10 employees + 25 volunteers), that has been promoting Free-Libre software and its culture to a French-speaking audience for 20+ years.
What does Framasoft do?
We strongly believe that Free-Libre software is one of the essential tools for achieving a Free-Libre society. That is why we maintain and contribute to lots of projects that aim to empower people to get more freedom in their digital lives.
Among those tools are:
- 20 FOSS based web-services that we host (mainly for our French-speaking audience) on our Degooglify Internet website, including Framadate and Framaforms… ;
- many talks, workshops, and participations to conventions ;
- A blog, where we share our views and where a group of volunteers translate into French news from the English-speaking FLOSS world ;
- Many, many ressources to help people and organizations in their transition to ethical digital tools (guides, documentation, even card games!) ;
Framasoft is funded by donations (94% of our 2024 budget), mainly grassroots donations (75% of the 2024 budget). As we mainly communicate in French, the overwhelming majority of our donations comes from the French-speaking audience. You can help us through joinpeertube.org/contribute.
We develop PeerTube
In the English-speaking community, we are mostly known for developing PeerTube, a self-hosted video and live-streaming free/libre platform, which has become the main alternative to Big Tech's video platforms.
From a student project to a software with international reach, our video platform solution is now, seven years later, used and acknowledged by many institutions!
The last major version of PeerTube, v7, has been released at the end of 2024, along with the first version of the official mobile app, available on both Android (Play Store, F-Droid) and iOS.
Now that the PeerTube platform has matured significantly over successive versions, we believe that the way to enable even more people to use PeerTube is to improve the mobile app so that it can be carried around in people's pockets.
Ask Us Anything!
Last month, we have published the roadmap for the project. This week, we also launched our new crowdfunding campaign which focuses on our mobile app.
We want to give you the opportunity through this AMA to give us feedback on the product and the project and discuss the crowdfunding campaign and our next steps!If you have any questions, please ask them below (and upvote those you want us to answer first).
We will answer them to the best of our abilities with the
/u/Framasoftaccount, from May. 28th 2025 5pm CET (11 am EST) until we are too tired ;).EDIT (8:16 pm CET): This wraps it for the day, thanks for all of your questions and feedback!
Will the official PeerTube app for Android ever adopt Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, and Material 3 Expressive?
-
Bonjour,
c/[email protected]!Framasoft (that's us!) is a small French non-profit (10 employees + 25 volunteers), that has been promoting Free-Libre software and its culture to a French-speaking audience for 20+ years.
What does Framasoft do?
We strongly believe that Free-Libre software is one of the essential tools for achieving a Free-Libre society. That is why we maintain and contribute to lots of projects that aim to empower people to get more freedom in their digital lives.
Among those tools are:
- 20 FOSS based web-services that we host (mainly for our French-speaking audience) on our Degooglify Internet website, including Framadate and Framaforms… ;
- many talks, workshops, and participations to conventions ;
- A blog, where we share our views and where a group of volunteers translate into French news from the English-speaking FLOSS world ;
- Many, many ressources to help people and organizations in their transition to ethical digital tools (guides, documentation, even card games!) ;
Framasoft is funded by donations (94% of our 2024 budget), mainly grassroots donations (75% of the 2024 budget). As we mainly communicate in French, the overwhelming majority of our donations comes from the French-speaking audience. You can help us through joinpeertube.org/contribute.
We develop PeerTube
In the English-speaking community, we are mostly known for developing PeerTube, a self-hosted video and live-streaming free/libre platform, which has become the main alternative to Big Tech's video platforms.
From a student project to a software with international reach, our video platform solution is now, seven years later, used and acknowledged by many institutions!
The last major version of PeerTube, v7, has been released at the end of 2024, along with the first version of the official mobile app, available on both Android (Play Store, F-Droid) and iOS.
Now that the PeerTube platform has matured significantly over successive versions, we believe that the way to enable even more people to use PeerTube is to improve the mobile app so that it can be carried around in people's pockets.
Ask Us Anything!
Last month, we have published the roadmap for the project. This week, we also launched our new crowdfunding campaign which focuses on our mobile app.
We want to give you the opportunity through this AMA to give us feedback on the product and the project and discuss the crowdfunding campaign and our next steps!If you have any questions, please ask them below (and upvote those you want us to answer first).
We will answer them to the best of our abilities with the
/u/Framasoftaccount, from May. 28th 2025 5pm CET (11 am EST) until we are too tired ;).EDIT (8:16 pm CET): This wraps it for the day, thanks for all of your questions and feedback!
wrote last edited by [email protected]Thank you for your amazing works.
Are you planning on implementing a privacy friendly recommendation algorithm? It would ideally run locally on the client's device.
edit: Oh and, if you haven't seen it yet, please see the PM I sent you.
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Bonjour,
c/[email protected]!Framasoft (that's us!) is a small French non-profit (10 employees + 25 volunteers), that has been promoting Free-Libre software and its culture to a French-speaking audience for 20+ years.
What does Framasoft do?
We strongly believe that Free-Libre software is one of the essential tools for achieving a Free-Libre society. That is why we maintain and contribute to lots of projects that aim to empower people to get more freedom in their digital lives.
Among those tools are:
- 20 FOSS based web-services that we host (mainly for our French-speaking audience) on our Degooglify Internet website, including Framadate and Framaforms… ;
- many talks, workshops, and participations to conventions ;
- A blog, where we share our views and where a group of volunteers translate into French news from the English-speaking FLOSS world ;
- Many, many ressources to help people and organizations in their transition to ethical digital tools (guides, documentation, even card games!) ;
Framasoft is funded by donations (94% of our 2024 budget), mainly grassroots donations (75% of the 2024 budget). As we mainly communicate in French, the overwhelming majority of our donations comes from the French-speaking audience. You can help us through joinpeertube.org/contribute.
We develop PeerTube
In the English-speaking community, we are mostly known for developing PeerTube, a self-hosted video and live-streaming free/libre platform, which has become the main alternative to Big Tech's video platforms.
From a student project to a software with international reach, our video platform solution is now, seven years later, used and acknowledged by many institutions!
The last major version of PeerTube, v7, has been released at the end of 2024, along with the first version of the official mobile app, available on both Android (Play Store, F-Droid) and iOS.
Now that the PeerTube platform has matured significantly over successive versions, we believe that the way to enable even more people to use PeerTube is to improve the mobile app so that it can be carried around in people's pockets.
Ask Us Anything!
Last month, we have published the roadmap for the project. This week, we also launched our new crowdfunding campaign which focuses on our mobile app.
We want to give you the opportunity through this AMA to give us feedback on the product and the project and discuss the crowdfunding campaign and our next steps!If you have any questions, please ask them below (and upvote those you want us to answer first).
We will answer them to the best of our abilities with the
/u/Framasoftaccount, from May. 28th 2025 5pm CET (11 am EST) until we are too tired ;).EDIT (8:16 pm CET): This wraps it for the day, thanks for all of your questions and feedback!
One thing that might get more content creators on PeerTube could be “advertising” as not just a video platform, but also a backup service.
I’m guessing most content creators have their original video and video project files backed up somewhere. Why not have the ability to use PeerTube for that?
You can already have PeerTube store the original video file, when you upload it, something YouTube can’t do.
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Bonjour,
c/[email protected]!Framasoft (that's us!) is a small French non-profit (10 employees + 25 volunteers), that has been promoting Free-Libre software and its culture to a French-speaking audience for 20+ years.
What does Framasoft do?
We strongly believe that Free-Libre software is one of the essential tools for achieving a Free-Libre society. That is why we maintain and contribute to lots of projects that aim to empower people to get more freedom in their digital lives.
Among those tools are:
- 20 FOSS based web-services that we host (mainly for our French-speaking audience) on our Degooglify Internet website, including Framadate and Framaforms… ;
- many talks, workshops, and participations to conventions ;
- A blog, where we share our views and where a group of volunteers translate into French news from the English-speaking FLOSS world ;
- Many, many ressources to help people and organizations in their transition to ethical digital tools (guides, documentation, even card games!) ;
Framasoft is funded by donations (94% of our 2024 budget), mainly grassroots donations (75% of the 2024 budget). As we mainly communicate in French, the overwhelming majority of our donations comes from the French-speaking audience. You can help us through joinpeertube.org/contribute.
We develop PeerTube
In the English-speaking community, we are mostly known for developing PeerTube, a self-hosted video and live-streaming free/libre platform, which has become the main alternative to Big Tech's video platforms.
From a student project to a software with international reach, our video platform solution is now, seven years later, used and acknowledged by many institutions!
The last major version of PeerTube, v7, has been released at the end of 2024, along with the first version of the official mobile app, available on both Android (Play Store, F-Droid) and iOS.
Now that the PeerTube platform has matured significantly over successive versions, we believe that the way to enable even more people to use PeerTube is to improve the mobile app so that it can be carried around in people's pockets.
Ask Us Anything!
Last month, we have published the roadmap for the project. This week, we also launched our new crowdfunding campaign which focuses on our mobile app.
We want to give you the opportunity through this AMA to give us feedback on the product and the project and discuss the crowdfunding campaign and our next steps!If you have any questions, please ask them below (and upvote those you want us to answer first).
We will answer them to the best of our abilities with the
/u/Framasoftaccount, from May. 28th 2025 5pm CET (11 am EST) until we are too tired ;).EDIT (8:16 pm CET): This wraps it for the day, thanks for all of your questions and feedback!
i'd love to self-host an instance, but my uplink bandwidth is rather poor (~20mbps at peak)
for a small instance how well could i do?
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Bonjour,
c/[email protected]!Framasoft (that's us!) is a small French non-profit (10 employees + 25 volunteers), that has been promoting Free-Libre software and its culture to a French-speaking audience for 20+ years.
What does Framasoft do?
We strongly believe that Free-Libre software is one of the essential tools for achieving a Free-Libre society. That is why we maintain and contribute to lots of projects that aim to empower people to get more freedom in their digital lives.
Among those tools are:
- 20 FOSS based web-services that we host (mainly for our French-speaking audience) on our Degooglify Internet website, including Framadate and Framaforms… ;
- many talks, workshops, and participations to conventions ;
- A blog, where we share our views and where a group of volunteers translate into French news from the English-speaking FLOSS world ;
- Many, many ressources to help people and organizations in their transition to ethical digital tools (guides, documentation, even card games!) ;
Framasoft is funded by donations (94% of our 2024 budget), mainly grassroots donations (75% of the 2024 budget). As we mainly communicate in French, the overwhelming majority of our donations comes from the French-speaking audience. You can help us through joinpeertube.org/contribute.
We develop PeerTube
In the English-speaking community, we are mostly known for developing PeerTube, a self-hosted video and live-streaming free/libre platform, which has become the main alternative to Big Tech's video platforms.
From a student project to a software with international reach, our video platform solution is now, seven years later, used and acknowledged by many institutions!
The last major version of PeerTube, v7, has been released at the end of 2024, along with the first version of the official mobile app, available on both Android (Play Store, F-Droid) and iOS.
Now that the PeerTube platform has matured significantly over successive versions, we believe that the way to enable even more people to use PeerTube is to improve the mobile app so that it can be carried around in people's pockets.
Ask Us Anything!
Last month, we have published the roadmap for the project. This week, we also launched our new crowdfunding campaign which focuses on our mobile app.
We want to give you the opportunity through this AMA to give us feedback on the product and the project and discuss the crowdfunding campaign and our next steps!If you have any questions, please ask them below (and upvote those you want us to answer first).
We will answer them to the best of our abilities with the
/u/Framasoftaccount, from May. 28th 2025 5pm CET (11 am EST) until we are too tired ;).EDIT (8:16 pm CET): This wraps it for the day, thanks for all of your questions and feedback!
Have you guys considered making a way for content creators to monetize their content? I am not one myself but I realize it's often a source of income they depend on and would be willing to use money to see such content myself.
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Love your work on Peertube!
Why doesn’t the penguin have a snorkel?
Why does he need to bring the animals under the water?
Why is the elephant on the other side?Looking at the art. It looks like David Revoy (artist of the libre comic "Pepper & Carrot") has made this so you'd have to ask him.
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i'd love to self-host an instance, but my uplink bandwidth is rather poor (~20mbps at peak)
for a small instance how well could i do?
I'm not from Framasoft, but those speeds should work well enough for personal projects, depending on what resolutions you want to provide the videos at - but in general, the video compression + P2P sharing of people watching the video + other Servers potentially providing redundancy if your content goes "viral" at some point should make this easily possible with those upload speeds.
Also check the question + answers here, which is relevant to your situation: https://lemmy.spv.sh/post/8543/15298
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What is the buffer (in months) that framasoft has when it comes to donations? (Aka, how long can you operate if all sources of funding suddenly dry up)
As the major part of our income comes from our fundraising campaign at the end of every year, it depends on when you ask this question. So, along the year, we're operating with something between 3 and 9 months buffer. Of course, we're lucky to also have monthly donators who help ensure that cash flow does not decline too much.
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Hey thanks for doing this! Impressive that you can support 10 paid staff. As someone also doing FOSS development in Europe, it's inspiring that you managed to achieve this so I'm hoping you could share some light. How do you have so many people donating? Do you have dedicated outreach people or just people donate on their own. My own FOSS projects typically just get enough donations to cover their hosting costs and not much else.
Did you start as a big team, or just kinda grew from one person's projects starting 20 years ago?
Any tips and strategies to other FOSS devs in Europe would be greatly appreciated.
Hi!
Thanks for your questions!
We didn't start big. Framasoft exists since 21 years with a team full of volunteers.
However, there are essential steps we reached during our journey.
First, we launched the de-google-ify campaign, aiming to help people to escape from Big Tech. This campaign happened only two years after Snowden's revelations and we think it played a big role in its success in France.
Quickly, we had enough money to hire new employees.
So, we had the ability to hire our sysadmin at full time. That helped us a lot to maintain a good service quality so people knew they could trust us with their data and use our services.
Finally, we hired someone dedicated to our communication. He did a huge work and helped us to find our identity: you know, all those cute mascots you can find on most of our communications.
We wanted FLOSS softwares to be attractive for most people and this new identity helped us a lot to reach a wider audience (not only tech-savvy people!).Also, we work hard each year to build funding campaigns. They are helping us a lot to collect the money we need to work but require at least 1 month of work from different people of our team.
Concerning tips and strategis to other FLOSS devs... It's kinda hard since we think the context we had is different from now. BUT, we truly think that being respectful to people using our services and transparent about our failures helped people to understand we are just a small team of humans trying to do their best!
I hope this answer helped you!
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I thought government grants would make up a big portion of their income, but according to Wikipedia, 98% of the money they received in 2019 was from donations.
So, yeah, it sounds like they really know how to get people to donate
You can get up-to-date and detailed statistics (2024) on the crowdfunding page in the "Who is Framasoft? How do they get funds to make PeerTube?" :
We are funded by donations (mainly from the French-speaking community). 94 % of our 2024 funds comes from donations, with 76 % from grassroots donations, and 18 % from fondations' grants (like NLnet).
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Thank you for developing PeerTube and the new iOS app, I enjoy it very much. You rock!
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@Framasoft would be really nice to work more on compatibility with other fediverse software. There have been a lot of quirks with how comments on peertube render across fediverse platforms, like the way your @mentions don't render as links when the posts feterate out to many other places etc. What can we do to iron out these type of issues other then just filing bug reports?
We're not aware of this federation issue. So yes, please, describe the problem at https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues and we'll look into it!
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Thank you for doing this!
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Thank you for your work.
As far as I understand it one of the big advantages is that every viewer simultaneously provides its download data for others to stream (peering). With this approach server capacity can be reduced but I wonder how well this works (If I even understood it correctly).
With this system could it be possible to host videos on an own server without having to pay huge sever costs?
Also what is a nice website to search through all videos, similar to the front page of YouTube?
The P2P system in PeerTube works very well if you have many concurrent viewers. You can have more information in our blogpost that details a P2P stress test: https://joinpeertube.org/news/stress-test-2023
But if most of the time you don't have many concurrent viewers, you'll still have to pay the bandwidth. But as you can see in the blog post above, PeerTube is not very expensive to host (if you don't have to store many videos). -
Hi!
Thank you for all your work
I'm wondering if 30 seconds is a reasonable latency for live streaming on a raspberry pi 5 instance ?
And if I want to store the videos on another drive, is it so simple as just changing the path for "/var/www/peertube/storage" in the production.yaml file ?
Finally, is it possible to connect to the live session chat with another fediverse instance (mastodon or lemmy) ?
Yes it is if you don't use muxing (disable transcoding) because we don't think the Raspberry CPU will be able to handle it.
Yes, you can use another drive with PeerTube. It just doesn't support a remote drive (network mounted point for example).
No, you can't connect to the live chat using Masotdon or Lemmy, but you can using another PeerTube instance or using a XMPP client. -
Will you guys add þe ability to login to an instance þat isn’t provided in þe app already into þe ios app?
Est-ce que vous allez ajouter la possibilité de se connecter à une instance qui n'est pas fournie dans l'application déjà dans l'application ios?
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IIRC WebTorrent support is removed. Is torrenting completely off the table?
We have replaced WebTorrent in the PeerTube player with https://github.com/novage/p2p-media-loader, which supports live streams. Torrents are not completely off the table, as they are still generated on the server. Users can download and use these in their preferred torrent client.
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Will the official PeerTube app for Android ever adopt Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, and Material 3 Expressive?
No, because the PeerTube app uses Flutter: https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube/mobile-application
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Hi!
Thanks for your questions!
We didn't start big. Framasoft exists since 21 years with a team full of volunteers.
However, there are essential steps we reached during our journey.
First, we launched the de-google-ify campaign, aiming to help people to escape from Big Tech. This campaign happened only two years after Snowden's revelations and we think it played a big role in its success in France.
Quickly, we had enough money to hire new employees.
So, we had the ability to hire our sysadmin at full time. That helped us a lot to maintain a good service quality so people knew they could trust us with their data and use our services.
Finally, we hired someone dedicated to our communication. He did a huge work and helped us to find our identity: you know, all those cute mascots you can find on most of our communications.
We wanted FLOSS softwares to be attractive for most people and this new identity helped us a lot to reach a wider audience (not only tech-savvy people!).Also, we work hard each year to build funding campaigns. They are helping us a lot to collect the money we need to work but require at least 1 month of work from different people of our team.
Concerning tips and strategis to other FLOSS devs... It's kinda hard since we think the context we had is different from now. BUT, we truly think that being respectful to people using our services and transparent about our failures helped people to understand we are just a small team of humans trying to do their best!
I hope this answer helped you!
wrote last edited by [email protected]Sure, it does look like you were at the right place at the right time indeed and then could continue from there. Having a dedicated communications person is also in my impression very important, but alas they're not as easy to find for FOSS projects.
Could you be able to elaborate what kind of wages you pay your staff? Are they market competitive, or below market rates for the same roles?
