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!

  • Ludrol@szmer.info
    16·
    9 months 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 scheduling TTRPG sessions that I have found, but it has a bunch of issues on mobile.

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      5·
      9 months 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!

  • iddqd404@lemmy.mlEnglish
    11·
    9 months 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!

  • JoYo@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    what are the problems that need solutions for mobile uploads to be supported?

    i do music video production entirely on ipad and have yet to find an aapp that supports mobile uploads. the web UI never seems to complete the upload.

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      14·
      9 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
        21·
        9 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
          5·
          9 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.

  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtf
    262·
    9 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.

    • Vegafjord eo@lemmy.ml
      32·
      9 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
      10·
      9 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.

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      11·
      9 months 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!

  • ComradePenguin@lemmy.ml
    1·
    8 months ago

    I see many people have asked about monatization. I want to use peertube more, but feel kinda guilty for wasting bandwidth, without contributing. So I haven’t started watching creators that are both on YouTube and Peertube on Peertube yet. I also use Grayjay with Chromecast, so I guess I don’t seed the content either

    Do you have any plans for a donation model that shares the donations with multiple instances based on views or settings from the user?

    In a perfect world I would just pay 10€ or another amount per month, and that would be distributed based on traffic to both instances and creators.

  • ddh@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    27·
    9 months ago

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

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      5·
      9 months 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!

  • pseudo@jlai.lu
    4·
    9 months ago

    What could you recommend to a privacy enthusiast that want to turn they privacy literacy into work-related competence?

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      6·
      9 months ago

      The digital mediation sector is not exactly thriving, but there are still opportunities to organize events that address the issue of privacy with the general public. On a more technical side, there are also companies that are specifically positioning themselves on these issues.

      • pseudo@jlai.lu
        2·
        9 months ago

        Thank you for all your answer. I’ll probably think of other questions later :)

  • bbk_9@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    9 months 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
      5·
      9 months 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.

  • atlien51@lemm.ee
    91·
    9 months ago

    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
      7·
      9 months ago

      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.

      • atlien51@lemm.ee
        4·
        9 months ago

        With websites like this I find that there needs to be strong moderation. Cause stupid people try to upload all kinds of gross shit thinking oh I’ll get away with it bc it’s a small website & I’ll overwhelm them

        • AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space
          3·
          9 months ago

          100℅ with you there, I had to struggle with some people trying the weirdest shit on my PeerTube instance, including repeated attempts at ban evasion. Things got better ever since I made registration manually approved only again, though. Even just fencing it off behind “willing and able to write a few coherent words” helps a lot.