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!

  • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    751·
    7 months 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
      39·
      7 months 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
        11·
        7 months ago

        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.worldOP
          17·
          7 months 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
            14·
            7 months 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
      27·
      7 months 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
        11·
        7 months 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).

  • Angel Mountain@feddit.nl
    32·
    7 months 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
      18·
      7 months 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
        2·
        7 months 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).

      • julianwgs@discuss.tchncs.de
        2·
        7 months 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.

    • NebLem@lemmy.world
      10·
      7 months 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
    311·
    7 months ago

    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.worldOP
      19·
      7 months 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.

  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtf
    271·
    7 months ago

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

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      18·
      7 months 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.

  • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al
    231·
    7 months 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.

  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtf
    201·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      7·
      7 months ago

      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.

    • Vegafjord eo@lemmy.ml
      31·
      7 months ago

      Id be against advertising on peertube, advertising is to mighten overproducers to overgrip peertube inhold. Inhold should rather be made on the grounds of the meaningful, and design should eyen how to forward the meaningful.

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      11·
      7 months 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.

  • spacemanspiffy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    7 months 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
      19·
      7 months 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
        8·
        7 months 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.

  • Killercat103@slrpnk.netEnglish
    161·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      10·
      7 months 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.

      • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
        15·
        7 months ago

        Getting people to stay on the site and watch videos.

        Not as a commercial goal or to sell more ads or whatever, but to try to recommend people the videos they want to see.

        Many open source platforms seem to despise recommendation algorithms because they are often used nefariously (get people emotionally invested aka angry) but they certainly have their uses if used with proper intentions.

        • aim_at_me@lemmy.nzEnglish
          3·
          7 months ago

          Yup. Just to add to your point for passers by. Existing algorithms in big tech organisations generally have 1 goal. Site retention and consequences be damned. Properly utilised, they can be used for good.

  • bistdunarrisch@lemmy.world
    14·
    7 months 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
      10·
      7 months 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
      10·
      7 months 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 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.

      • Meldrik@lemmy.wtf
        5·
        7 months 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.

    • Meldrik@lemmy.wtf
      5·
      7 months 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
      2·
      7 months 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.

  • ddh@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    13·
    7 months ago

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