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!
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)
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.
Hi! Nothing to ask but I just wanted to let you know I appreciate your work!
Thanks!
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?
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.
Have you ever discussed about PeerTube with big creators of news videos, e.g. Euronews, France 24, DW, etc?
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.
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?
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).
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.
I’d like an easy way to keep seeding videos without leaving the page open
I think a browser extension, similar to tor snowflake would be a good way to do this.
Thanks for your work!
What are your opinions on using open source algorithms to augment user retention?
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.
You have my unconditional respect I donated a couple of times already. I wish you the best, keep on going!
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 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
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
That’s a pretty fat pipe, cool
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!
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.
Ευχαριστώ για την απάντηση! Ναι φυσικά, δεν αναφέρθηκα στον ρυθμό ανάπτυξής σας, απλώς αν ο στόχος είναι η διάδοση του ελεύθερου λογισμικού, θα έχει μεγαλύτερη επιτυχία η παραγωγή περιεχομένου σε μια γλώσσα που μιλάνε περισσότεροι άνθρωποι.
Αλλιώς καταλήγουμε με περιεχόμενο που ήδη από τη στιγμή της συγγραφής του, έχει εξ’ ορισμού ένα παραπάνω εμπόδιο στο να έχουν πρόσβαση άνθρωποι, και μάλιστα εσκεμμένα από τον συγγραφέα. Συνήθως το ελεύθερο λογισμικό προσπαθεί να έχει και διάφορα πλεονεκτήματα, όπως η εκπαίδευση του κόσμου, η βελτίωση της ιδιωτικότητας του ατόμου, κλπ κλπ.
Γράφοντας ο καθένας στη γλώσσα του, είναι σαν να λέμε ότι μόνο οι λίγοι που μιλάνε την γλώσσα αξίζει να χρησιμοποιήσουν πχ ένα λογισμικό που έχει μεγαλύτερη ιδιωτικότητα. Αυτό προφανώς δεν συμβαίνει άμα κάνουμε τις ίδιες ενέργειες αλλά χρησιμοποιώντας μια γλώσσα που μιλάει ο μισός πλανήτης
Οι άνθρωποι που μιλάνε αγγλικά, είναι πάρα πολύ περισσότεροι από εκείνους που μιλάνε γαλλικά, κι αν πρέπει κάθε κείμενο να το ξαναγράφουμε 200 φορές σε 200 γλώσσες, αφιερώνουμε ενέργεια που θα μπορούσε να βοηθήσει και με άλλους τρόπους το έργο
online I still prefer to use a language that almost everyone speaks
i wonder how many languages this mindset would kill off
ehm no, fuck english
Δεν πειράζει, μπορείς να μην μιλάς αγγλικά εσύ και να έχεις πρόσβαση σε λιγότερο περιεχόμενο στο Internet 🤷
Do larger one-time or smaller monthly donations help your organization more?
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!
Thank you! Would you ever consider employing developers elsewhere in EU to work on the apps & services?
Hi!
We’re actually considering hiring a new full-stack developer in the future (to work on all of our services, not on PeerTube) and that would be possible for us to hire someone leaving in another country if:
- the person accepts a French salary-level
- the person speaks French (a big part of our team does not speak English)
Keep watching our posts on our social media, so you won’t miss the announce!—
Exciting! I am however not speaking french so I am automatically excluded as a candidate this time around :)
I hope you find a really good candidate!
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.)
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!
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 !
![[AMA] We're Framasoft, we develop PeerTube, ask us anything!](https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.world%2Fpictrs%2Fimage%2F9224cd0a-533e-41e5-b4f3-d5e8f4430c28.jpeg){kind=link}