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!
Are you hiring? How can I get professionally involved?
Is landscape mode coming to Peertube app on iOS?
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).
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.
Hi! Nothing to ask but I just wanted to let you know I appreciate your work!
Thanks!
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.
See our answer at https://lemmy.world/post/30376256/17325191
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.
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’d like an easy way to keep seeding videos without leaving the page open
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
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.
You have my unconditional respect I donated a couple of times already. I wish you the best, keep on going!
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?
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).
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.
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 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 🤷
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!
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
![[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}