[AMA] We're Framasoft, we develop PeerTube, ask us anything!
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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?
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Oh, and, of course a very important second question from me: What are your favourite dinosaurs?
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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.Thank you !
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Thanks for your work. I have two questions:
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Will the set-up wizzard include federation settings? (Federate by default or defederate by default)?
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What are current plans for FramaDate? That was the only usable project for scheduling TTRPG sessions that I have found, but it has a bunch of issues on mobile.
Hi!
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The wizard is still not designed, but yes we think it will include federation settings so it's easier for institutions or private instances to setup a "safe" PeerTube instance.
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We're actually evaluating alternative softwares for Framadate, with mobile support as a required feature. We'll tell more about it once we're ready!
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Will the peertube app get tablet support soon?
Hi!
We want to work on it ASAP but we can't give you an ETA for now.
You can know more about our roadmap concerning PeerTube in the blog post we published last month! -
Great dino choice from great devs!
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Thank you!
Would you ever consider employing developers elsewhere in EU to work on the apps & services?Hi!
We're actually considering hiring a new full-stack developer in the future (to work on all of our services, not on PeerTube) and that would be possible for us to hire someone leaving in another country if:
- the person accepts a French salary-level
- the person speaks French (a big part of our team does not speak English)
Keep watching our posts on our social media, so you won't miss the announce!---
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As I'm German (from near the French border, even, but unfortunately, not speaking even just basic French), and Germany is also relatively big on the Fediverse and the open source/hacker communities, I've often wondered, if there are (official) cooperations between German and French activists. Does Framasoft (or individual members of it) participate in anything like that?
I don't think we have been. Thing is, we do not know of many organizations that are identical to us in other countries: we're not really a Linux or FLOSS group, and we don't lobby governments or other institutions. In some ways, we're similar to Disroot which also offers services as we do, but since we do quite a lot of other stuff (developing PeerTube, producing commons, sharing knowledge, and we even have a publishing house!)
Even if we have been working with a lot of partners, most of them are French and on very specific topics.
If people want to join forces on the FLOSS-software-hosting services topic, maybe look into something similar to the (very french) CHATONS (and possibly https://libreho.st/, but it's no longer active to our knowledge).
On the topic of contributing to develop things together, we're not doing much apart from PeerTube (we only have two developers, and both are working nearly fully on PeerTube).
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Collab with arte would be great?
I believe they have their own player already, so unsure what would be their direct interest, but the PeerTube ecosystem could be useful to them anyway. For instance there's a big French institution that uses PeerTube runner for their video transcription tasks (and paid for specific features), but doesn't use the PeerTube server or player at all.
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I don't think we have been. Thing is, we do not know of many organizations that are identical to us in other countries: we're not really a Linux or FLOSS group, and we don't lobby governments or other institutions. In some ways, we're similar to Disroot which also offers services as we do, but since we do quite a lot of other stuff (developing PeerTube, producing commons, sharing knowledge, and we even have a publishing house!)
Even if we have been working with a lot of partners, most of them are French and on very specific topics.
If people want to join forces on the FLOSS-software-hosting services topic, maybe look into something similar to the (very french) CHATONS (and possibly https://libreho.st/, but it's no longer active to our knowledge).
On the topic of contributing to develop things together, we're not doing much apart from PeerTube (we only have two developers, and both are working nearly fully on PeerTube).
Thank you for the answer, that makes a lot of sense. I think the very unique structure and goals you have developed have served you well, since PeerTube might be one of the best fleshed-out projects in the Fediverse space, at least in my opinion.
