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!

  • @[email protected]
    8•21 days ago

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

    • @[email protected]
      6•21 days ago

      Don’t know about what’s on Odyssey - but content on PeerTube is pretty neat, in my opinion - if you like Linux, FLOSS, tinkering and in general, people making videos out of being passionate about something. Also occasional weirdness, and also an increasing amount of “normal” content, at least I had that feeling in the past weeks.

      Check [email protected] and [email protected] 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.

      • @[email protected]
        4•21 days ago

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

        • @[email protected]
          3•21 days ago

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

  • @[email protected]
    13•22 days ago

    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?

  • wakest ⁂
    10•22 days ago

    @Framasoft would be really nice to work more on compatibility with other fediverse software. There have been a lot of quirks with how comments on peertube render across fediverse platforms, like the way your @mentions don’t render as links when the posts feterate out to many other places etc. What can we do to iron out these type of issues other then just filing bug reports?

    • wakest ⁂
      1•22 days ago

      @Framasoft hey @db0 I just commented in this post from my mastodon and see its not federating to the OP post. Any idea why? I know I was recently able to comment on .ml posts but maybe I am blocked from .world? How does one even go about figuring that out

        • wakest ⁂
          1•22 days ago

          @db0 oh weird it’s now showing up. I guess federation was just really slow. It wasn’t showing on either .ml or .world for like 20 minutes

          • db0
            3•22 days ago

            Note that comment federation can get a bit weird between lemmy and mastodon. Replies from mastodon might only be visible from the instance of the user’s you’re replying to directly, if that instance is not the one owning the community, because of the way that mastodon tends to send replies to the user’s instance, instead of sendind them to the community’s instance (which would then forward them to everyone)

  • @[email protected]English
    5•21 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.

    • FramasoftOP
      5•22 days ago

      Hello!

      Yes, we’re actually working on modernizing our de-google-ify suit! However, it’ll take time since we need to review each service and identify what are our needs and how we can fit them! Do we need to develop new features for an existing software? Are we able to do so? Is there a new software fully fitting our needs? Or maybe there are other promising softwares but not ready yet?

      There are a lot of things to consider, especially when we’re talking of services being used by 2M people each month!

  • @[email protected]
    16•22 days ago

    You have my unconditional respect I donated a couple of times already. I wish you the best, keep on going!

  • spv.shEnglish
    7•22 days ago

    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?

    • Meldrik
      2•22 days ago

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

    • @[email protected]
      7•22 days ago

      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

      • spv.shEnglish
        2•22 days ago

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

  • @[email protected]
    16•22 days ago

    Thanks for your work. I have two questions:

    1. Will the set-up wizzard include federation settings? (Federate by default or defederate by default)?

    2. What are current plans for FramaDate? That was the only usable project for scheduling TTRPG sessions that I have found, but it has a bunch of issues on mobile.

    • FramasoftOP
      4•22 days ago

      Hi!

      1. The wizard is still not designed, but yes we think it will include federation settings so it’s easier for institutions or private instances to setup a “safe” PeerTube instance.

      2. We’re actually evaluating alternative softwares for Framadate, with mobile support as a required feature. We’ll tell more about it once we’re ready!

  • NebLem
    12•22 days ago

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

    • FramasoftOP
      11•22 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!

  • NebLem
    3•22 days ago

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

    • FramasoftOP
      4•22 days ago

      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.

  • @[email protected]
    14•22 days ago

    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?

    • @[email protected]
      15•22 days ago

      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.

      • Meldrik
        5•22 days ago

        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.

    • Meldrik
      7•22 days ago

      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.

    • FramasoftOP
      10•22 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).

    • NebLem
      2•22 days ago

      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.

  • ddhEnglish
    24•22 days ago

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