[AMA] We're Framasoft, we develop PeerTube, ask us anything!

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[AMA] We're Framasoft, we develop PeerTube, ask us anything!

*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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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.

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!

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?

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).

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.

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

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).

Framasoft are incredible folks. I just did an interview with Booteille yesterday!

Folks can watch the interview here:

https://video.firesidefedi.live/w/wuqKuurLmzX4ooDuEjJddG

Or listen to the Fedicast here:

https://audio.firesidefedi.live/@firesidefedi/episodes/booteille-framasoft-livestream-2025-05-27

Nice, thank you ! Subscribed to the channel :-)

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

Hi! Nothing to ask but I just wanted to let you know I appreciate your work!

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

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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.

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.

what does augmenting user retention mean in practice?

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.

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.

As I'm German (from near the French border, even, but unfortunately, not speaking even just basic French), and Germany is also relatively big on the Fediverse and the open source/hacker communities, I've often wondered, if there are (official) cooperations between German and French activists. Does Framasoft (or individual members of it) participate in anything like that?

I don't think we have been. Thing is, we do not know of many organizations that are identical to us in other countries: we're not really a Linux or FLOSS group, and we don't lobby governments or other institutions. In some ways, we're similar to Disroot which also offers services as we do, but since we do quite a lot of other stuff (developing PeerTube, producing commons, sharing knowledge, and we even have a publishing house!)

Even if we have been working with a lot of partners, most of them are French and on very specific topics.

If people want to join forces on the FLOSS-software-hosting services topic, maybe look into something similar to the (very french) CHATONS (and possibly https://libreho.st/, but it's no longer active to our knowledge).

On the topic of contributing to develop things together, we're not doing much apart from PeerTube (we only have two developers, and both are working nearly fully on PeerTube).

hi from the Mastodon team, we'd love to work more closely with you in the future on Fediverse and freedom related topics 🙂
also, I am personally a big fan of PeerTube, and think the work you do is fantastic! 🐙

Hi!

Thank you so much for your kind words!

Feel free to send us a message through our contact form whenever you want to talk about a specific topic! We're always interested to talk with other Fediverse project so we can try to provide softwares!

https://contact.framasoft.org/en/

We hope to hear from you soon!

Thank you for the answer, that makes a lot of sense. I think the very unique structure and goals you have developed have served you well, since PeerTube might be one of the best fleshed-out projects in the Fediverse space, at least in my opinion.

Thanks for your kind words!

Collab with arte would be great?

I believe they have their own player already, so unsure what would be their direct interest, but the PeerTube ecosystem could be useful to them anyway. For instance there's a big French institution that uses PeerTube runner for their video transcription tasks (and paid for specific features), but doesn't use the PeerTube server or player at all.

That is a good question to which I have to direct answer I guess.

arte is a media producer and server at the same time. Peertube provides the fundament for serving videos. To me it sounds like there should be a big overlap.

arte already has build their system but let's think big and long term, not only one year ahead. Arte could use a peertube backend (with extra steps) and focus on what they do best, producing content. By adjust peertube to their needs, other broadcasters could use it as well and many would profit. The broadcasters could easily share selected media with others, making the services interconnected. The user wouldn't need many accounts for France Télévisions, ARD and others. The user wouldn't need 5 apps for the same type of media.

Copyright law would be in the way, Arte content is only available in France, Germany and parts of Switzerland. I have to use a VPN to even get their youtube videos, which are otherwise geofenced.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

How does it seed videos anyway? I'm not familiar with this feature of Peertube, is it using Bittorrent? if so one could just use any Bittorrent client assuming Peertube exposes the magnet link (they really should).

CC: @Framasoft@lemmy.world @moonpiedumplings@programming.dev

They used to utilise an implementation of WebTorrent, and compatibility for it is still in the system, but discouraged. Enabling it essentially doubles the storage space needed, due to different requirements of how videos have to be encoded/stored. They switched to HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) with a P2P protocol implemented via WebRTC since then:

https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/configuration#web-video-transcoding-or-hls-transcoding

Hmm I see. Kind of a shame really that they stopped using it, would make it super easy to seed content just by putting the torrent in your torrent client. I wonder why they couldn't have the videos encoded the new way but still use torrenting to seed. Oh well hopefully someone makes a standalone seeding program or plugin in the future.

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.

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!

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.

Oh, sorry to hear this. We'll make sure to follow your observations to the team.

As we can now afford to pay designers, some parts of the interface are being improved, but it's a slow progress. Here are some resources on our work in v7: https://joinpeertube.org/news/share-ressources

About finding your favorite YouTube creators on PeerTube, this is still hard, as they're probably aren't as much as you think they'd be, if you think the scraping tool would be very useful. Using browser extensions such as https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/peertube-companion/ or https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/peertubeify/ which redirect you to a PeerTube version of a YouTube video could give you a view of the content currently on both platforms.

Otherwise, accounts such as Fedivideo mentioned in this thread are doing a very good job to curate content you might like, and we want to help that (with our limited resources).

They have sepiasearch to search peertube instances. The drawback is that only specific instances are searchable, because of dubious contents on some instances.

https://sepiasearch.org/search

Sepia Search consist of all these instances: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances

Also, PeerTube platforms can activate the same search index as Sepia Search, so you can make the same search directly from a platform.

I find Fedivideo is quite a good place to start finding stuff. But would be interested to hear from Framasoft their ideas.
https://fedi.video/

There’s honestly not many content creators on PeerTube from YouTube and I’m not sure how a tool like that would even work.

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?

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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!

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

Not Framasoft or affiliated with them, but I am running an instance myself. If you have a FQDN and can set up a PeerTube server with federation enabled utilising the bandwith behind it, there are settings to automatically mirror and seed videos from other instances. For example, my server currently has ~300GB which it utilises to automatically pull trending, new and most-watched videos from trusted instances to mirror and seed as a redundancy.

Setting this up is relatively easy, basically just uncommenting and specifying stuff in a config text file. Besides that you could disable user registrations and anything else, maybe the web interface altogether, and just let it do the mirroring. At least AFAIK, there doesn't seem to be a way to do this, without setting up PeerTube with Fedaration enabled first, though. But maybe they will provide additional info I haven't learned yet!

GIGABIT per SECOND?!?!!! i will blow you to mirror my videos once i set up an instance

eye contact too

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m not talking about ads.

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.

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!

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!!

Yup, we're been there a while! <3

Just came to say Thank You!

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

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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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It’s possible to filter only local videos.

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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?

Looking at the art. It looks like David Revoy (artist of the libre comic "Pepper & Carrot") has made this so you'd have to ask him. ;)

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!

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

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!

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?

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.

Oh, and, of course a very important second question from me: What are your favourite dinosaurs?

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.

We did not plan such a thing for now, but we know some people have been working on this, see for instance :
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/peertube-picks/
https://github.com/solidheron/peertube_recomendation_algorythm/

If you have details on how it would work in your idea, feel free to share thoughts on https://ideas.joinpeertube.org/ if it's not already done.

Well, what you could do is pretty much implement what that extension does directly into PeerTube's frontend itself. You could also do this at the backend, which I guess would speed up the recommendations.

Will the peertube app get tablet support soon?

Hi!

We want to work on it ASAP but we can't give you an ETA for now.
You can know more about our roadmap concerning PeerTube in the blog post we published last month!

IIRC WebTorrent support is removed. Is torrenting completely off the table?

We have replaced WebTorrent in the PeerTube player with https://github.com/novage/p2p-media-loader, which supports live streams. Torrents are not completely off the table, as they are still generated on the server. Users can download and use these in their preferred torrent client.

IIRC WebTorrent support is removed. Is torrenting completely off the table?

It is? Like, in general, or just for the app? Just want to make sure I am not missing some huge news here, because if it is removed entirely going forward (it definitely still works on the web interface on Firefox as of me writing this) - that would be rather bad. It's a huge part of why PeerTube works so well.

That’s why I said “IIRC” because I don’t remember either 🙂

It’s still there, but it is not recommended.

PeerTube still have P2P though, but not using torrent technology.

Ah, I might have been misinformed then, I genuinely thought they were still using WebTorrent for P2P as a standard. As long as they still have a P2P system in place, I am relieved.

(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!

Hey I just want to say that I love your work! Truly inspirational. I think that it shows that small teams can work better in some respects as larger orgs. Is this something that you are seeing as well?

I think we are indeed more efficient, more agile and adaptive than larger orgs, but it's probably also because we were lucky enough to have many very skilled team mates :)

However, it also means that not everything is as polished as some bigger players, but we think we manage to give the best value for the price!

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?

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 !

i'd love to self-host an instance, but my uplink bandwidth is rather poor (~20mbps at peak)

for a small instance how well could i do?

I'm not from Framasoft, but those speeds should work well enough for personal projects, depending on what resolutions you want to provide the videos at - but in general, the video compression + P2P sharing of people watching the video + other Servers potentially providing redundancy if your content goes "viral" at some point should make this easily possible with those upload speeds.

Also check the question + answers here, which is relevant to your situation: https://lemmy.spv.sh/post/8543/15298

i'm a hipster who produces 640x480 @ 30.00. we actually might be out here

Set it up and ask other PeerTube servers to mirror your videos, so that viewers will stream the video from there as well.

What are your plans to improve the user experience?

Hi!

There are different projects we're working on:
* We now work a lot with a design agency called La Coopérative Des Internets to improve PeerTube design. They helped us a lot to have an interface easier to understand for non-tech-savvy people! We still have progress to do but are actively working on it!
* We want to improve the user experience on mobile. We know most people watch video on their mobile phones so that's why we are now putting resources to develop an official mobile app. You can learn more about our plans for the mobile app in the crowdfunding campaign we just launched!
* We also want to improve the way to discover content on PeerTube. First steps are not easy enough now and are working (with designers, again) on this subject. As an example, we're trying to improve Sepia Search so it's easier to discover new content on it. (No ETA to share yet)
* We also get inspired by community efforts and other Fediverse projects! So if you've ideas about how to improve the situation, feel free to share them on our dedicated feedback website!

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)?

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.

I was looking at it around the beginning of this year, so it would have been with Sepia. And if you search something simple like 'sewing' or 'movies' you shouldn't get topics such as modern politics as your top results. That's not just out of left field, that is a whole different ballpark. If I did a search for 'sewing' and got embroidery results...ok. Same game, just different position. Makes a bit more sense. You're still stitchin'.

Also, using something like 'literature' shouldn't get you the same top results as 'sewing' does.

SUPER FRUSTRATING!!!

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

I get it, and I have been ambivalent throughout my life about it - but I think every time I sit down and think about it, I am still more appreciative of the benefits of a global "Lingua Franca", compared to the problems. I do appreciate that I can enter the majority of communities online, and immediately, there's one language everyone can participate in the discussions with, without the need of machine translations and other hoops.

But I do agree that it would be wrong to extrapolate from English being such a language that everyone speaks "well enough" (often with local quirks, like my German bleeding through when I provide run on sentences en masse), to saying content should be made exclusively/primarily in English only.

I think Framasoft are good enough at providing their technology offerings with English documentation, which is I think the important part. They also accept English feedback, and can communicate with people in English like here. And their more local, French focus has, I think, helped them with a stable foundation at home and a supportive community.

I hate the influence of English on everything now ngl

I don't always like it much either, but we do need a common language for exchanging information etc; there is already too much fake news, misinformation, and echo chambers without having a language barrier.

Δεν πειράζει, μπορείς να μην μιλάς αγγλικά εσύ και να έχεις πρόσβαση σε λιγότερο περιεχόμενο στο Internet 🤷

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) ?

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.

oh so live chat uses XMPP protocol, cool!

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!

Do you believe in the fediverse's ability to compete or to replace the current the social media environnement either from a technical perspective or from the dynamic of the environment?
If so, would it be a close remplacement or will it change deeply the way people use social media?

Same question specifically for PeerTube.

Most likely not replace the existing digital environment, but we know that the current digital landscape and its uses could evolve very quickly (whether due to the invention of something new/negative or geopolitical issues). When such events occur, it is important that the available alternatives avoid well-known flaws, and the fediverse has a lot to offer in this regard. But we must continue to work on improving the minor annoyances that federation brings.

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?

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

Not Framasoft, or affiliated with them - but I managed to set it up from basically having 0 practical experience and only very basic, non-professional knowledge. I'd say it's not especially hard, and compared with setting up Lemmy and Mastodon, I'd even call it easy, personally.

I'd say the definitive source is the online docs, with a good installation guide included:

https://docs.joinpeertube.org/

https://docs.joinpeertube.org/install/any-os

by
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Will you guys add þe ability to login to an instance þat isn’t provided in þe app already into þe ios app?

Est-ce que vous allez ajouter la possibilité de se connecter à une instance qui n'est pas fournie dans l'application déjà dans l'application ios?

Yes, we are looking into allowing users to add their platforms manually (as you can already do on Android). We just don't have an ETA yet!

Salut! Ca va? (Learning French)

Salut !

Nous allons bien, oui, merci !

Nous espérons que toi aussi ! :)

Oui, je suis content, merci.

Learning French

Moi aussi! Quelle methode utilisez-vous?

I only understand your first sentence lol. I think you’re asking how I’m learning?

Oui. "What method are you using?"

A mix of Duolingo & Rosetta Stone. I’m going to protest Duolingo and just stick with RS. My parter (who’s French) makes fun of RS because it’s so formal lol, so over think and struggle with it.

I've been using Duolingo. I get, and even agree with, most of the criticism of it, but I'm not sure anything else would actually work for me because the heavy gamification is what keeps me actually making progress at it.

That’s the same reason I’m second guessing. It’s keeping me to keep learning and the friends quests are fun too.

Salut ! Ça va et toi ?

Ca va bein, merci.

Comment est la météo chez toi ? Chez moi, il fait gris.

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

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.

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

Do you have privacy-promotion organisations you would like to recommend (whatever language they are speaking)?

Will your games eventually support mobile-first concepts? I've tried the first handful of your framagames offerings and none of them work on a mobile phone. If that is indicative of your overall work, I fear the only users you'll attract will be staunch keyboard and desktop users. While that was the norm 20 years ago when you started, the landscape has changed. Today, most users' primary and only compute device is their mobile phone. Please consider expanding your reach and accommodating the needs of today's audience.

Hi,

The Framagames website was set up a long time ago and it only features FLOSS games made by external devs, we do very very little development apart from PeerTube.

As almost all of our services are built on third-party free software, our lack of adaptability to mobile devices is simply a reflection of a general lack of expertise in this area within the free software community.
However, we are well aware that we missed the boat on this topic many years ago.

That is why we are exploring the publication of mobile applications, first with PeerTube, as in this case, but also with Lokas, an audio transcription application.

Finally, several of our services are also aging and need to be replaced by other solutions that are more compatible with mobile use.

Hello guys! Congratulations for your work on so many services! I have a question about Mobilizon: if I want to see events from Bucharest, is there a way to see events from all the instances, or do I have to search on each instance? Thank you!

Why make a peertube client isn't of partnering with an app the already does peertube?

I've been following all of your projects for two decades. I just want to say: un énorme merci!

Thanks for the support!

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.

Hey. I'm part of the ad hoc team which is assembling to continue development of Mobilizon. So far it's just a tiny group based out of Lyon France, but we're growing.

Are you willing to provide us at least some small guarantee of access to Thomas for advice and explanations about the decisions he made about the architecture and what direction it should take? I know that her already answers queries, but I worry that it's on his own time.

What strategies did you find most successful in earning your NLNet and other grants?

Perhaps it's because we explain our vision clearly and have demonstrated that we have kept our promises over the years. But above all, we are very lucky to have them.

Hii is peertube any good? I thought odysee was the YouTube competitor but the content on that platform is a fucking nightmare

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.

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

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.

You could upload content to make it better !

Ok imma start a travel channel

Are you hiring? How can I get professionally involved?

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.

Why doesn't framasoft monetize by providing hosted instances of PT?

Is landscape mode coming to Peertube app on iOS?

Not sure if it's a question. I was looking into PT, but there aren't hardly any instances that are 1. open and 2. have much activity. Also, it seemed like you only got the content on the instance, it wasn't easy at all to find non-local content.

(Also, most of it was playthroughs)

I think you must have gotten unlucky there, which does highlight a real problem of discoverability/onboarding. There definitely are instances, which provide (easy) access to more of the overall PeerTube ecosystem. To self-promote, mine for example is connected to 782 other platforms at the time of this writing, and utilises a global search index (like a lot of instances do). As another example, peertube.wtf is connected to a whopping 1086 other platforms, due to being in the game longer and following an overall more permissive moderation policy.

It's regrettable that turned out to be your experience with PeerTube, and it does highlight an issue with onboarding/discoverability - but it is not necessarily the most common experience people have with PT. Although, I must admit, there is no representative surveying or anything, so I can't be sure what the most common experience is.

Thanks for this response, I've actually gone and bookmarked your instance for a later look. I didn't really find an instance like that on the lemmy server list for whatever reason, so this is nice, appreciate it.

What the fuck was the point of your comment?

what was the point of yours?

To point out how rude and unproductive your comment was in an AMA post and to mock you for it. These guys are developing Peertube and you take this opportunity to complain about nonsense?