[AMA] We're Framasoft, we develop PeerTube, ask us anything!
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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topic, maybe look into something similar to the (very french) CHATONS (and possibly https://libreho.st/, but it's no longer active to our knowledge).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.
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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topic, maybe look into something similar to the (very french) CHATONS (and possibly https://libreho.st/, but it's no longer active to our knowledge).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).
hi from the Mastodon team, we'd love to work more closely with you in the future on Fediverse and freedom related topics
also, I am personally a big fan of PeerTube, and think the work you do is fantastic!
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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.
We did not plan such a thing for now, but we know some people have been working on this, see for instanceāÆ:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/peertube-picks/
https://github.com/solidheron/peertube_recomendation_algorythm/If you have details on how it would work in your idea, feel free to share thoughts on https://ideas.joinpeertube.org/ if it's not already done.
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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?
Yeah, we think we worked hard but we still had a bit of luck
We really think communication is important too. However, to be precise, even our colleague which joined us to start working on it was not an expert of the field. He was just a volunteer interested to work on our communication and started to do so. Some years later, we're able to hire him so he could be truly dedicated to this mission!
We thinks it's better to hire someone being able to work with others and passionate about digital issues than an expert in a specific field. Technical skills can be acquired but human skills are harder to get!
Concerning how we pay our staff: we pay a lot more than most non-profit organizations in France, but it's less than what our employees could expect regarding their skills on the competitive market.
Though, we think money is not the only reason why our talents stay with us: we also provide really good work conditions (We try to respect each one rythm and needs, either it's material or something like following a training). Finally, all of our employees find a meaning in our mission (raising awareness about digital issues, providing alternative and respectful services to organizations and people, etc). -
hi from the Mastodon team, we'd love to work more closely with you in the future on Fediverse and freedom related topics
also, I am personally a big fan of PeerTube, and think the work you do is fantastic!Hi!
Thank you so much for your kind words!
Feel free to send us a message through our contact form whenever you want to talk about a specific topic! We're always interested to talk with other Fediverse project so we can try to provide softwares!
https://contact.framasoft.org/en/
We hope to hear from you soon!
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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.
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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 Framaformsā¦ ;
- 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 have access to ~20Gb/s worth of extra bandwidth. Is there any way I can "donate" it to different Peertube instances? Right now I just use it to seed things and run XMR/I2P nodes
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Salut! Ca va? (Learning French)
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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?
Set it up and ask other PeerTube servers to mirror your videos, so that viewers will stream the video from there as well.
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I love the idea that stuff should be free, but at the moment we do live a capitalist society and hosting videos especially is a costly enterprise.
I am wondering therefore whether there are any plans to provide options for content creators (and server hosters) to make money with videos on peertube (other than including advertisements in the videos)?
I think Peertube can never grow when content creators do have the costs of creating, hosting and serving their videos, while at the same time not having a good way to earn money back for their work.
Monetization is a complicated and potentially sensitive topic that we have not yet addressed.
However, this is not the only reason why YouTube is in its dominant position; even with monetization, the network effect of this platform will always remain.PeerTube today meets the demand for video hosting (e.g., the market where Vimeo is positioned), but is not really a distribution channel with social features like YouTube.
While our goal is not to provide a definitive answer to this shortcoming, we are considering possibilities for integration with third-party payment or subscription platforms (such as Patreon) to make it easy to restrict videos to subscribers, for example. That's something we're thinking of, but is very far from being done.
Finally, there is already the Bunseed project (website exclusively in French, sorry) which is looking into this issue and has a prototype based on Ghost (publishing, subscription, email) + PeerTube + payment platform (such as Stripe).
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I have access to ~20Gb/s worth of extra bandwidth. Is there any way I can "donate" it to different Peertube instances? Right now I just use it to seed things and run XMR/I2P nodes
Not Framasoft or affiliated with them, but I am running an instance myself. If you have a FQDN and can set up a PeerTube server with federation enabled utilising the bandwith behind it, there are settings to automatically mirror and seed videos from other instances. For example, my server currently has ~300GB which it utilises to automatically pull trending, new and most-watched videos from trusted instances to mirror and seed as a redundancy.
Setting this up is relatively easy, basically just uncommenting and specifying stuff in a config text file. Besides that you could disable user registrations and anything else, maybe the web interface altogether, and just let it do the mirroring. At least AFAIK, there doesn't seem to be a way to do this, without setting up PeerTube with Fedaration enabled first, though. But maybe they will provide additional info I haven't learned yet!
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What are your plans to improve the user experience?
Hi!
There are different projects we're working on:
- We now work a lot with a design agency called La CoopƩrative Des Internets to improve PeerTube design. They helped us a lot to have an interface easier to understand for non-tech-savvy people! We still have progress to do but are actively working on it!
- We want to improve the user experience on mobile. We know most people watch video on their mobile phones so that's why we are now putting resources to develop an official mobile app. You can learn more about our plans for the mobile app in the crowdfunding campaign we just launched!
- We also want to improve the way to discover content on PeerTube. First steps are not easy enough now and are working (with designers, again) on this subject. As an example, we're trying to improve Sepia Search so it's easier to discover new content on it. (No ETA to share yet)
- We also get inspired by community efforts and other Fediverse projects! So if you've ideas about how to improve the situation, feel free to share them on our dedicated feedback website!
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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!---
Exciting! I am however not speaking french so I am automatically excluded as a candidate this time around
I hope you find a really good candidate!
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Yeah, we think we worked hard but we still had a bit of luck
We really think communication is important too. However, to be precise, even our colleague which joined us to start working on it was not an expert of the field. He was just a volunteer interested to work on our communication and started to do so. Some years later, we're able to hire him so he could be truly dedicated to this mission!
We thinks it's better to hire someone being able to work with others and passionate about digital issues than an expert in a specific field. Technical skills can be acquired but human skills are harder to get!
Concerning how we pay our staff: we pay a lot more than most non-profit organizations in France, but it's less than what our employees could expect regarding their skills on the competitive market.
Though, we think money is not the only reason why our talents stay with us: we also provide really good work conditions (We try to respect each one rythm and needs, either it's material or something like following a training). Finally, all of our employees find a meaning in our mission (raising awareness about digital issues, providing alternative and respectful services to organizations and people, etc).Ye I know that there's a lot of self-fulfillment coming from FOSS work. It's why I do it even though I'm not getting paid. However being in Luxembourg, even market competitive rates are barely affordable, and good vibes doesn't pay my rent, so alas if our org had enough money to pay someone, I would personally still have to continue with the wage work.
It's unfortunate that people give so much to for-profits, but people doing things that are objectively better for the world, have to tighten their belts to get by.
Anyway, thank you for your time. You explained pretty much what has been my observations in the FOSS space. I agree with all your takes. Perhaps in the future Framasoft and Haidra might be able to collaborate.
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Y'all hiring?
(Kinda joking 'cause I know you just said you're small, but I am genuinely interested in figuring out how to get a software dev job with a French company as an American looking to emigrate.)
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Do larger one-time or smaller monthly donations help your organization more?
We prefer monthly donations because they help us maintain financial stability throughout the year, whereas one-time donations tend to come in mainly when we run fundraising campaigns like this one (which means that some months our cash flow is low).
Thank you for your support!
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will you try to modernize the office suit (framacalc etc) like you did peertube?
Hello!
Yes, we're actually working on modernizing our de-google-ify suit!
However, it'll take time since we need to review each service and identify what are our needs and how we can fit them! Do we need to develop new features for an existing software? Are we able to do so? Is there a new software fully fitting our needs? Or maybe there are other promising softwares but not ready yet?There are a lot of things to consider, especially when we're talking of services being used by 2M people each month!
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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 Framaformsā¦ ;
- 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!
Hi! Nothing to ask but I just wanted to let you know I appreciate your work!
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One thing that might get more content creators on PeerTube could be āadvertisingā as not just a video platform, but also a backup service.
Iām 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 canāt do.
Id be against advertising on peertube, advertising is to mighten overproducers to overgrip peertube inhold. Inhold should rather be made on the grounds of the meaningful, and design should eyen how to forward the meaningful.
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I love your guys work and fully support it. I think libre software is the only way foward if we don't want worse and worse platforms.
Question:
Do you think Peertube will likely ever have a the diversity of content that YouTube has or with different motives for making content it may never reach that scale?We don't think PeerTube will directly replace YouTube at some point, but we do think that some organizations, media outlets, and content creators may not have the same level of interest in posting on YouTube as they do today. For all of them, we hope they will find PeerTube to be a good fit.
