this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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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!

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[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 17 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (3 children)

Thank you for your amazing works.

Are you planning on implementing a privacy friendly recommendation algorithm? It would ideally run locally on the client's device.

edit: Oh and, if you haven't seen it yet, please see the PM I sent you.

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[–] Mazesecle@lemm.ee 15 points 6 days ago (7 children)

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!

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[–] atlien51@lemm.ee 8 points 5 days ago (3 children)

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 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 15 points 6 days ago (4 children)

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

[–] lagoon8622@sh.itjust.works 9 points 6 days ago

That's a pretty fat pipe, cool

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[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Hey, guys, I know I'm too late to the party, but my city just announced that they spent half a million dollars of Microsoft office licenses last year. I think that's nuts. I want to try to persuade them to switch non-power-users to LibreOffice suite and reduce their office licenses by over 90%. Do you have any advice, examples, or selling points that can help me persuade them to cut Microsoft office licenses instead of literal firefighters? And, seeing as this is late, I'd welcome anybody answering. Thanks!

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 13 points 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

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.world 13 points 6 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.

[–] obsidianfoxxy7870@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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?

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[–] grue@lemmy.world 15 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.)

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[–] bistdunarrisch@lemmy.world 16 points 6 days ago (4 children)

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?

[–] AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 14 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 10 points 6 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).

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[–] Ludrol@szmer.info 16 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] Blaze@piefed.social 16 points 6 days ago (1 children)
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[–] Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 6 points 5 days ago

I have been wanting to degoogle for a while and it has been a slow process. But youtube has been a big one for me. In large part because, ironically, I cannot get freetube to work with a VPN. Peertube, sounds better.

[–] medem@lemmy.wtf 11 points 6 days ago (2 children)

What is the authoritative source of information for learning how to run an instance of peertube and how difficult is it for a moderately skilled sysadmin to do so?

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 10 points 6 days ago

The main thing is our documentation https://docs.joinpeertube.org/. Basic install should be really fine.

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[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Just came to say Thank You!

I've been using FramaGit ever since Github went Microsoft.

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 9 points 6 days ago (1 children)
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[–] Penny7@lemm.ee 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Hi! One day I want to move from YouTube to PeerTube (in the process of getting some things done before I do) and when I was trying to explore it, one thing that frustrated me was trying to search for anything on the platform.

I tried to do a searches for random topics and the top search results instances/servers that had nothing to do with what I was looking for.

This frustration was also echoed by somebody with experience on the platform that I ended up talking with. They were able to direct me to the specific instances I'd want because they're a part of them too, but it shouldn't be so difficult to find what you want, so my question is are you trying to fix the search engine on your platform to make it more user friendly so that most of your platform isn't seemingly word of mouth (so to speak)?

[–] AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Not Framasoft or affiliated with them. Depending on how long ago your attempt was, their Sepia Search tool may be what you are looking for. That search index has also become the main search option for many instances and it's definitely a lot better than the options a few years ago.

That being said, discoverability is still a problem. Search algorithms are actually deceptively hard to create and optimise - and with no personalised algorithm, creating a good experience needs more invested time and work at the moment (finding and adding subscriptions).

Speaking of algorithms, there's a promising project with a lot of potential: PeerTube Picks, which currently is in the form of a Firefox add-on that implements a very basic personalised algorithm, which, anecdotally, has helped me discover a few channels/videos I would have otherwise missed. There's also !peertube@lemmy.world and !peertube@lemmy.wtf to find and share videos, channels and playlists, although that is of course kind of word of mouth, still.

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[–] keepthepace@slrpnk.net 13 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Not much to say, I love your work! Thank you for what you do and for existing!

Ah yes, maybe something: I think the fediverse suffers from a lack of recommendation/search system. We are a bit burned out from the terrible consequences of the for profit recommendations of Youtube and Twitter, but I think a system that would be actually controlled by the user would be a very precious discovery and adoption tool. Is there something like that being worked on somewhere?

[–] AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It's barebones and very much a WIP - and not official - but for PeerTube, there is PeerTube Picks, a Firefox add-on, that tries to provide a very simple "algorithm" experience, which may grow to become what you are looking for.

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[–] plule@jlai.lu 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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!!

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[–] neblem@lemmy.world 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Do larger one-time or smaller monthly donations help your organization more?

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 11 points 6 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!

[–] ademir@lemmy.eco.br 8 points 6 days ago

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?

[–] Marty_TF@lemmy.zip 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

will you try to modernize the office suit (framacalc etc) like you did peertube?

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[–] rob299@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 6 days ago (4 children)

Can you add some kind of Peertube communities feature similar to Lemmy, to make it easier find get local videos hosted on local servers.

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Unsure if this would work, but the idea is interesting enough to be discussed on https://ideas.joinpeertube.org/ if you can share it and give details on how it work in your mind.

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[–] HotsauceHurricane@lemmy.world 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Love your work on Peertube!

Why doesn’t the penguin have a snorkel? Why does he need to bring the animals under the water? Why is the elephant on the other side?

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