this post was submitted on 28 May 2025

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[AMA] We're Framasoft, we develop PeerTube, ask us anything! (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by Framasoft@lemmy.world to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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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!

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[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 111 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

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.world 48 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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 14 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 20 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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).

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[–] Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 34 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.world 18 points 4 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).

[–] ozoned@piefed.social 46 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Framasoft are incredible folks. I just did an interview with Booteille yesterday!

Folks can watch the interview here:

https://video.firesidefedi.live/w/wuqKuurLmzX4ooDuEjJddG

Or listen to the Fedicast here:

https://audio.firesidefedi.live/@firesidefedi/episodes/booteille-framasoft-livestream-2025-05-27

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[–] iddqd404@lemmy.ml 9 points 3 days ago

(Not a question) I have used services hosted by Framasoft many times, but I wasn't aware that you were also the developers of PeerTube! I have almost stopped using Y*utube and I've been trying to use PeerTube more and more. The main hurdle is finding content, which I'm sure will get easier and easier as the platform gets adopted and known in the fediverse and beyond. Congratulations for you efforts promoting Free and Libre software, keep up the good work!

[–] double_quack@lemm.ee 3 points 2 days ago

Are you hiring? How can I get professionally involved?

[–] nlgranger@lemmy.world 29 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Hi! Nothing to ask but I just wanted to let you know I appreciate your work!

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 19 points 3 days ago

Thanks!

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 34 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Have you considered implementing Librapay into PeerTube? Would be a nice tool for viewers to fast and easily support content creators.

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 23 points 3 days ago

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.

[–] angelmountain@feddit.nl 46 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 25 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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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[–] neblem@lemmy.world 18 points 4 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.

[–] Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee 47 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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)

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 24 points 4 days ago

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.

[–] downdaemon@lemmy.ml 16 points 3 days ago (4 children)

I'd like an easy way to keep seeding videos without leaving the page open

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[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Hey, guys, I know I'm late to the party, but my city just announced that they spent half a million dollars of Microsoft office licenses last year. I think that's nuts. I want to try to persuade them to switch non-power-users to LibreOffice suite and reduce their office licenses by over 90%. Do you have any advice, examples, or selling points that can help me persuade them to cut Microsoft office licenses instead of literal firefighters? And, seeing as this is late, I'd welcome anybody answering. Thanks!

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 24 points 4 days ago (3 children)

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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[–] spacemanspiffy@lemmy.world 20 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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?

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 25 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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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[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 31 points 4 days ago (7 children)

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.

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 14 points 3 days ago

Oh, sorry to hear this. We'll make sure to follow your observations to the team.

As we can now afford to pay designers, some parts of the interface are being improved, but it's a slow progress. Here are some resources on our work in v7: https://joinpeertube.org/news/share-ressources

About finding your favorite YouTube creators on PeerTube, this is still hard, as they're probably aren't as much as you think they'd be, if you think the scraping tool would be very useful. Using browser extensions such as https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/peertube-companion/ or https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/peertubeify/ which redirect you to a PeerTube version of a YouTube video could give you a view of the content currently on both platforms.

Otherwise, accounts such as Fedivideo mentioned in this thread are doing a very good job to curate content you might like, and we want to help that (with our limited resources).

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[–] Killercat103@slrpnk.net 22 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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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[–] defolos_tech@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago

Merci pour votre travail, c'est génial ! 👏💪

Have you ever thought about offering compute capabilities (with OpenLambda for ex) or hosting web services ? I'd personnally pay for that, and there's a need for European cloud alternatives !

[–] helvetpuli@sopuli.xyz 4 points 2 days ago

Hey. I'm part of the ad hoc team which is assembling to continue development of Mobilizon. So far it's just a tiny group based out of Lyon France, but we're growing.

Are you willing to provide us at least some small guarantee of access to Thomas for advice and explanations about the decisions he made about the architecture and what direction it should take? I know that her already answers queries, but I worry that it's on his own time.

[–] pedroapero@lemmy.ml 14 points 3 days ago

You have my unconditional respect I donated a couple of times already. I wish you the best, keep on going!

[–] stochastic_parrot@sh.itjust.works 19 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Have you ever discussed about PeerTube with big creators of news videos, e.g. Euronews, France 24, DW, etc?

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 13 points 3 days ago

Sadly no, right now we don't really have the time to approach these types of organizations and try to make partnerships. However, there is the possibility for a hosting provider offering PeerTube as a solution to contact them and make them a complete offer.

[–] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 20 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Thanks for your work!

What are your opinions on using open source algorithms to augment user retention?

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[–] DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org 24 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Thank you for developing PeerTube and the new iOS app, I enjoy it very much. You rock!

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[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 17 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 15 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Mazesecle@lemm.ee 14 points 3 days ago (6 children)

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!

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 41 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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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[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 14 points 4 days ago (4 children)

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

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 19 points 3 days ago

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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[–] atlien51@lemm.ee 5 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Hii is peertube any good? I thought odysee was the YouTube competitor but the content on that platform is a fucking nightmare

[–] AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Don't know about what's on Odyssey - but content on PeerTube is pretty neat, in my opinion - if you like Linux, FLOSS, tinkering and in general, people making videos out of being passionate about something. Also occasional weirdness, and also an increasing amount of "normal" content, at least I had that feeling in the past weeks.

Check !peertube@lemmy.world and !peertube@lemmy.wtf for a rough overview of what to expect and recommendations.

But it is of course also a miniscule amount of content when compared to the giants. And if you go on the wrong instances, there definitely are spammers and grifters to be found. But usually, they get excluded from trustworthy instances.

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[–] Lootboblin@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Is landscape mode coming to Peertube app on iOS?

[–] AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 20 points 4 days ago (9 children)

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?

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[–] Penny7@lemm.ee 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Hi! One day I want to move from YouTube to PeerTube (in the process of getting some things done before I do) and when I was trying to explore it, one thing that frustrated me was trying to search for anything on the platform.

I tried to do a searches for random topics and the top search results instances/servers that had nothing to do with what I was looking for.

This frustration was also echoed by somebody with experience on the platform that I ended up talking with. They were able to direct me to the specific instances I'd want because they're a part of them too, but it shouldn't be so difficult to find what you want, so my question is are you trying to fix the search engine on your platform to make it more user friendly so that most of your platform isn't seemingly word of mouth (so to speak)?

[–] AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Not Framasoft or affiliated with them. Depending on how long ago your attempt was, their Sepia Search tool may be what you are looking for. That search index has also become the main search option for many instances and it's definitely a lot better than the options a few years ago.

That being said, discoverability is still a problem. Search algorithms are actually deceptively hard to create and optimise - and with no personalised algorithm, creating a good experience needs more invested time and work at the moment (finding and adding subscriptions).

Speaking of algorithms, there's a promising project with a lot of potential: PeerTube Picks, which currently is in the form of a Firefox add-on that implements a very basic personalised algorithm, which, anecdotally, has helped me discover a few channels/videos I would have otherwise missed. There's also !peertube@lemmy.world and !peertube@lemmy.wtf to find and share videos, channels and playlists, although that is of course kind of word of mouth, still.

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[–] Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 4 points 3 days ago

I have been wanting to degoogle for a while and it has been a slow process. But youtube has been a big one for me. In large part because, ironically, I cannot get freetube to work with a VPN. Peertube, sounds better.

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