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Framasoft @lemmy.world
AMA

We're Framasoft, we develop PeerTube, ask us anything!

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!

206 comments

  • 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!

      • 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?

    • 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).

  • 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.

  • 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?

    • 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 integratio you mentioned EDIT: As I have learned, while they are using P2P connections, it is no longer the WebTorrent protocol to their advantage. Here's a video I remember talking about this as an example.

      • 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.

    • 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).

    • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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 scheduling TTRPG sessions that I have found, but it has a bunch of issues on mobile.

    • 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!

  • 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.

  • I want to run a PT instance that just mirrors 100% of the CC-licensed videos on YouTube, so folks using Tor and VPNs can access it.

    I'm not looking to make money, but I do need to cover the monthly costs of the server. What methods are available to monetize the site? Is there some plugin that can simply inject (privacy friendly) pre-watch ads?

    • For now, it's mostly only the possibility writing in the "About" page of the server ways to support it, possibly with a banner above videos to encourage people to give money. Creators can also add a "Support" button below videos to tell viewers how to support them.

      But I think some people are working on requiring people to login and have a subscription to view videos.

      I don't know of an existing plugin that injects pre-roll ads, but it could probably already be developed with the current available APIs.

  • 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!!

  • The most exciting feature of having the same protocol, IMHO, is to be able to access the same channels with different kind of interfaces. Accessing Peertube channel as an Lemmy Community, or a Mastodon profile. The user is able to chose how they prefer to consume content. Are there plans to promote better integration between different platforms?

  • Hey I just want to say that I love your work! Truly inspirational. I think that it shows that small teams can work better in some respects as larger orgs. Is this something that you are seeing as well?

    • I think we are indeed more efficient, more agile and adaptive than larger orgs, but it's probably also because we were lucky enough to have many very skilled team mates :)

      However, it also means that not everything is as polished as some bigger players, but we think we manage to give the best value for the price!

  • 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 don't believe it would make a big difference. Platforms have made it very convenient for content creators to view all kind of insights on their audience, hence they might want to support the need for accounts.

  • 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.

    • IIRC WebTorrent support is removed. Is torrenting completely off the table?

      It is? Like, in general, or just for the app? Just want to make sure I am not missing some huge news here, because if it is removed entirely going forward (it definitely still works on the web interface on Firefox as of me writing this) - that would be rather bad. It's a huge part of why PeerTube works so well.

      • That’s why I said “IIRC” because I don’t remember either 🙂

      • It’s still there, but it is not recommended.

        PeerTube still have P2P though, but not using torrent technology.

  • 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 Coopérative 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!

  • 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?

    • 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!

  • Will your games eventually support mobile-first concepts? I've tried the first handful of your framagames offerings and none of them work on a mobile phone. If that is indicative of your overall work, I fear the only users you'll attract will be staunch keyboard and desktop users. While that was the norm 20 years ago when you started, the landscape has changed. Today, most users' primary and only compute device is their mobile phone. Please consider expanding your reach and accommodating the needs of today's audience.

    • Hi,

      The Framagames website was set up a long time ago and it only features FLOSS games made by external devs, we do very very little development apart from PeerTube.

      As almost all of our services are built on third-party free software, our lack of adaptability to mobile devices is simply a reflection of a general lack of expertise in this area within the free software community. However, we are well aware that we missed the boat on this topic many years ago.

      That is why we are exploring the publication of mobile applications, first with PeerTube, as in this case, but also with Lokas, an audio transcription application.

      Finally, several of our services are also aging and need to be replaced by other solutions that are more compatible with mobile use.

  • 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.

206 comments