Bonjour, c/[email protected]!
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Thank you for developing PeerTube and the new iOS app, I enjoy it very much. You rock!
Thanks a lot!
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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!
Oh, and, of course a very important second question from me: What are your favourite dinosaurs?
Spinosaurus aegyptiacus for sure!
Great dino choice from great devs!
💖
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).
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!
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!
Collab with arte would be great?
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 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.
Thank you for doing this!
Thanks for being there!
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!
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!—
Interessant !
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!
Thanks for your work. I have two questions:
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Will the set-up wizzard include federation settings? (Federate by default or defederate by default)?
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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!
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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.
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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!
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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!
Thank you !
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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!
Do you have privacy-promotion organisations you would like to recommend (whatever language they are speaking)?
Thanks for your work!
What are your opinions on using open source algorithms to augment user retention?
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.
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.
![[AMA] We're Framasoft, we develop PeerTube, ask us anything!](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9224cd0a-533e-41e5-b4f3-d5e8f4430c28.jpeg){kind=link}