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!
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).
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 mentionedEDIT: 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.
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).
Thank you for making such a solid platform!
![[AMA] We're Framasoft, we develop PeerTube, ask us anything!](https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.world%2Fpictrs%2Fimage%2F9224cd0a-533e-41e5-b4f3-d5e8f4430c28.jpeg){kind=link}