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!

  • Angel Mountain@feddit.nl
    15·
    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.

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      12·
      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).

      • wiki_me@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        8 days ago

        Maybe a survey can disprove my opinion. but i would argue the option of having ads plus paying for the ability to remove ads is something most users would accept (even if there is a vocal minority). especially if you explain that researching and developing some forms of content (documentaries, video courses, investigative journalism) can take dozen of hours and is not feasible to do without getting paid when aiming for the highest quality.

        That could be better then just restricting videos (mitra could also be a open source alternative to patreon).

    • NebLem@lemmy.world
      4·
      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.

  • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al
    14·
    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.

  • spacemanspiffy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    9 days ago

    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.worldOP
      14·
      9 days ago

      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.

      • jagged_circle@feddit.nlEnglish
        5·
        9 days ago

        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.

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      7·
      9 days ago

      We’re fine on giving people the choice to use the algorithm they want. Today our « Hot » sorting type is using a derivative of Reddit’s old algorithm, but we could add new ones. However, it takes time to focus on this topic, so it’s not a priority.

  • grue@lemmy.world
    8·
    10 days ago

    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.)

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      5·
      9 days ago

      Hi!

      We’re not for now but we’d probably look for a full-stack dev in the future! Nothing sure yet!

      Keep an eye on our social media if you’re interested in this position!

  • pedroapero@lemmy.ml
    7·
    9 days ago

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

  • bistdunarrisch@lemmy.world
    7·
    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?

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      4·
      9 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).

    • NebLem@lemmy.world
      1·
      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.

  • plule@jlai.lu
    6·
    9 days ago

    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!!

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      5·
      9 days ago

      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!

  • jagged_circle@feddit.nlEnglish
    5·
    9 days ago

    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?

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      6·
      9 days ago

      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.

  • iddqd404@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    9 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!

  • pseudo@jlai.lu
    5·
    10 days ago

    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?

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      9 days ago

      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.

  • defolos_tech@lemmy.world
    4·
    9 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 !