Framasoft
A french not-for-profit dedicated to popular education on digital matters, by advocating FLOSS. We work on De-Googlifying the Internet and we develop PeerTube.
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Framasoft@lemmy.worldOPto Open Source@lemmy.ml•[AMA] We're Framasoft, we develop PeerTube, ask us anything!1·2 months agoYeah, 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).
Framasoft@lemmy.worldOPto Open Source@lemmy.ml•[AMA] We're Framasoft, we develop PeerTube, ask us anything!0·2 months agoHi!
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!
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).