Bonjour, c/opensource@lemmy.ml!

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/Framasoft account, 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!

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      9 days ago

      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!

  • medem@lemmy.wtf
    0·
    9 days ago

    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?

  • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    0·
    10 days ago

    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.

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      10 days ago

      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!

      • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        0·
        10 days ago

        Sure, it does look like you were at the right place at the right time indeed. 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?

        • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
          0·
          9 days ago

          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).

          • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            0·
            9 days ago

            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.

    • Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      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

      • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
        0·
        10 days ago

        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).

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      10 days ago

      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!

  • lambipapp@lemmy.world
    0·
    10 days ago

    Thank you! Would you ever consider employing developers elsewhere in EU to work on the apps & services?

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      9 days ago

      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!

  • bistdunarrisch@lemmy.world
    0·
    10 days ago

    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?

    • Meldrik@lemmy.wtf
      0·
      10 days ago

      There’s nothing stopping you installing PeerTube on your own home server and uploading your videos to that.

      If your internet bandwidth is low, you can have other PeerTube servers mirror your videos.

      So when someone watches your videos, it will not only download the data from your home server, but also from other PeerTube servers that mirror your videos.

      It won’t reduce server storage usage, because the video needs to be placed somewhere, but it will reduce bandwidth and traffic usage.

      Some PeerTube websites have Sepia Search enabled, so fx from PeerTube.wtf, you can search through 1000+ servers.

    • NebLem@lemmy.world
      0·
      10 days ago

      Also not Framasoft, but for your search question their Sepia Search https://sepiasearch.org/ would be your best bet to get hits across known Peertube instances/platforms.

      Your favorite Peertube instance/platform has its own front page, and they’ve done a bit of work in the Android app to have an explore tab to have similar across its tracked instances.

    • AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space
      0·
      10 days ago

      Not part of Framasoft, but I am administrating a PeerTube platform/instance myself, and can anecdotally say, that it works rather well. Another factor is, that as an admin, you can set up to automatically mirror videos on other instances, when they meet certain criteria.

      For example, I have ~300GB set aside to mirror trending, new and most-watched videos of some instances, that I consider to have quality (EDIT: and reliably non-illegal) content regularily (e.g. spectra.video, makertube.net, peertube.wtf, etc.) That way, in addition to just users watching videos acting as a seeding peer via webtorrent, my own dedicated server in Finland among other professional servers with large bandwith also add to the resilience of the network, even for smaller instances.

      Anecdotally, I have also heard of some people running a PeerTube instance successfully from just a SBC, like a RaspPi or similar, from home, utilising the WebTorrent integration you mentioned to their advantage. Here’s a video I remember talking about this as an example.

      • Meldrik@lemmy.wtf
        0·
        10 days ago

        From PeerTube docs:

        At the beginning of PeerTube, we only supported Web Video (previously known as “WebTorrent”) streaming. Due to several limitations of the Web Video system, we had to add HLS with P2P support. Unfortunately, we can’t use the same video file for the two methods: we need to transcode 2 different versions of the file (a fragmented mp4 for HLS, and a raw mp4 for Web Videos).

        So if you enable Web Videos and HLS, the storage will be multiplied by 2.

        We recommend you to enable HLS (and disable Web Videos if you don’t want to store 2 different versions of the same video resolution) because video playback in PeerTube web client is better:

        • Support P2P (using WebRTC) to exchange parts of the video with other users watching the same video to save server bandwidth
        • Support video redundancy by other PeerTube platforms
        • The player can adapt video resolution automatically
        • Video resolution change is smoother

        It’s probably not WebTorrent you are using, HLS.

        Also, thank you for running with redundancy! I need to get it setup myself, with some new SSDs.

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      10 days ago

      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).

  • AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space
    0·
    10 days ago

    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?

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      9 days ago

      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).

      • andypiper@lemmy.world
        0·
        9 days ago

        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! 🐙

        • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
          0·
          9 days ago

          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!

      • AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space
        0·
        9 days ago

        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.

      • sapetoku@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        10 days ago

        Copyright law would be in the way, Arte content is only available in France, Germany and parts of Switzerland. I have to use a VPN to even get their youtube videos, which are otherwise geofenced.

      • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
        0·
        9 days ago

        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.

  • Ludrol@szmer.info
    0·
    10 days ago

    Thanks for your work. I have two questions:

    1. Will the set-up wizzard include federation settings? (Federate by default or defederate by default)?

    2. What are current plans for FramaDate? That was the only usable project for sheudling TTRPG sessions that I have found, but it has a bunch of issues on mobile.

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      10 days ago

      Hi!

      1. 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.

      2. 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!

  • Angel Mountain@feddit.nl
    0·
    10 days ago

    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.

    • NebLem@lemmy.world
      0·
      10 days ago

      Not Framasoft, but here’s a few ideas on monetizing:

      The software allows you to post a “Support” button under the video with links for donations, etc. It also allows you to upload platform member only (internal) and password protected videos that you could charge access via another means to unlock.

      Plugins can be added by admins to add monetization more directly as well. For example https://github.com/kontrollanten/peertube-plugin-premium-users is an attempt adds the ability to have premium videos with Stripe as the payment processor/verifier.

      Admins can also soft fork and add in whatever customizations to enable monetization too as long as they adhere to the AGPL terms.

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      9 days ago

      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).

      • julianwgs@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        9 days ago

        My opinion: Figuring monetization out while keeping most of your audience happy will be the most important step to be a viable alternative to YouTube. Big YouTubers like LinusTechTips, Corridor Digital or something like Nebula already have their own service, because it is worth it to have fewer people pay more. Sadly everyone of them develops their own solution which are not interoperable. Are you in the talks with anyone to migrate to PeerTube backend? I think this would be such a gamechanger.

  • bbk_9@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    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) ?

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      10 days ago

      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.

  • HestiaMauuu@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    0·
    10 days ago

    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?

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      10 days ago

      Yes, we are looking into allowing users to add their platforms manually (as you can already do on Android). We just don’t have an ETA yet!

  • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al
    0·
    10 days ago

    First of all, thanks for doing this.

    Secondly, the friction of using PeerTube is more than any other application within the Fediverse. Even subscribing doesn’t follow a sane UX with the button randomly appearing at the bottom of the screen. Do you not think that mirroring something closer to the YouTube UX would minimise friction?

    Thirdly, can you please create a tool that will scrape my YouTube subscriptions and look for their PeerTube channels, so I actually have a reason to open the app. Finding content is still really really really hard.