[AMA] We're Framasoft, we develop PeerTube, ask us anything!
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Do you believe in the fediverse's ability to compete or to replace the current the social media environnement either from a technical perspective or from the dynamic of the environment?
If so, would it be a close remplacement or will it change deeply the way people use social media?Same question specifically for PeerTube.
Most likely not replace the existing digital environment, but we know that the current digital landscape and its uses could evolve very quickly (whether due to the invention of something new/negative or geopolitical issues). When such events occur, it is important that the available alternatives avoid well-known flaws, and the fediverse has a lot to offer in this regard. But we must continue to work on improving the minor annoyances that federation brings.
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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!
What is the authoritative source of information for learning how to run an instance of peertube and how difficult is it for a moderately skilled sysadmin to do so?
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Do you think that the ability to browse content without an account is a differentiating factor to the fediverse?
Would a content creator be able to attract lurking non-fedi user using that capacity? -
I've been following all of your projects for two decades. I just want to say: un énorme merci!
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Thanks for your work!
What are your opinions on using open source algorithms to augment user retention?
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What is the authoritative source of information for learning how to run an instance of peertube and how difficult is it for a moderately skilled sysadmin to do so?
wrote last edited by [email protected]Not Framasoft, or affiliated with them - but I managed to set it up from basically having 0 practical experience and only very basic, non-professional knowledge. I'd say it's not especially hard, and compared with setting up Lemmy and Mastodon, I'd even call it easy, personally.
I'd say the definitive source is the online docs, with a good installation guide included:
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Have you considered implementing Librapay into PeerTube? Would be a nice tool for viewers to fast and easily support content creators.
We have a support button that can be shown on videos to provide instructions on how to support a channel (for instance with Liberapay). I don't know what you had in mind that would the integration would be like, but please share it on https://ideas.joinpeertube.org/. Most probably it could be solved through a simple plugin.
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Have you ever discussed about PeerTube with big creators of news videos, e.g. Euronews, France 24, DW, etc?
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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
i'm a hipster who produces 640x480 @ 30.00. we actually might be out here
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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.
That's an idea (and some content creators kind of already do that if YouTube unpublishes their video for some reason), but it's not very selling as an idea. Being independent from fake companies claiming the rights to some content is a selling point, though.
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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
GIGABIT per SECOND?!?!!! i will blow you to mirror my videos once i set up an instance
eye contact too
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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.
See our answer at https://lemmy.world/post/30376256/17325191
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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
Yes, you can setup an instance yourself and activate redundancy for the instances you'd like to help : https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/following-instances#platforms-redundancy
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We strongly believe that Free-Libre software is one of the essential tools for achieving a Free-Libre society.
French-speaking audience
Why is your user target group mainly a French-speaking audience? It seems like hosting services in English would be more in-line with having a "Free-Libre society"; instead it is "Free-Libre society but only in French-speaking regions"
(I'm not from USA), but online I still prefer to use a language that almost everyone speaks, instead of creating content only few peopke can enjoy
(Μπορώ να γράψω την ερώτηση και στα ελληνικά άμα θέλετε να την καταλάβετε καλύτερα)
Nevertheless, I really am grateful for your work in Peertube and your other projects!
Because we're a very small team, and we're okay with it staying this way. Not all of us are speaking English correctly. Having a worldwide audience would mean communicating in English all the time, providing assistance in English.
Also, we want to grow at a pace that suits us. We would much prefer if there were other organizations doing exactly the same thing as us in other countries that we could refer people to.
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I may still have a pdf listing free software (or just games?) somewhere that you were writing from nearly two decades ago, and still today you provide so many great resources. Thank you!!
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Just came to say Thank You!
I've been using FramaGit ever since Github went Microsoft.
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I write closed source, proprietary code for a living.
That makes me sad.
Have your developers any advice on how to get paid to write Free Software?
Our developers were writing Free Software on their free time before they got hired, because Framasoft knew them through their free-time productions, but obviously not everybody can do that, and we've very lucky to have an economic model which allows us to pay developers properly.
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What is the authoritative source of information for learning how to run an instance of peertube and how difficult is it for a moderately skilled sysadmin to do so?
The main thing is our documentation https://docs.joinpeertube.org/. Basic install should be really fine.
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We did not plan such a thing for now, but we know some people have been working on this, see for instance :
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.
Well, what you could do is pretty much implement what that extension does directly into PeerTube's frontend itself. You could also do this at the backend, which I guess would speed up the recommendations.
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Our developers were writing Free Software on their free time before they got hired, because Framasoft knew them through their free-time productions, but obviously not everybody can do that, and we've very lucky to have an economic model which allows us to pay developers properly.
I have a friend that does this.
They're right. First build an amazing profile contributing to Foss. Then apply for grants. If you don't like writing grants, get a part time job doing evil closed code and another part time doing Foss.
