this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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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!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

Are you hiring? How can I get professionally involved?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

Thank you for making such a solid platform!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Is landscape mode coming to Peertube app on iOS?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Hi! Are you talking about the player or the whole app?

If you're talking about the whole app, we do not plan to support it for now except for future tablets versions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 114 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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!

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago

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).

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Framasoft are incredible folks. I just did an interview with Booteille yesterday!

Folks can watch the interview here:

https://video.firesidefedi.live/w/wuqKuurLmzX4ooDuEjJddG

Or listen to the Fedicast here:

https://audio.firesidefedi.live/@firesidefedi/episodes/booteille-framasoft-livestream-2025-05-27

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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).

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago

Not Framasoft, but here's a few ideas on monetizing:

The software allows you to post a "Support" button under the video with links for donations, etc. It also allows you to upload platform member only (internal) and password protected videos that you could charge access via another means to unlock.

Plugins can be added by admins to add monetization more directly as well. For example https://github.com/kontrollanten/peertube-plugin-premium-users is an attempt adds the ability to have premium videos with Stripe as the payment processor/verifier.

Admins can also soft fork and add in whatever customizations to enable monetization too as long as they adhere to the AGPL terms.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Have you considered implementing Librapay into PeerTube? Would be a nice tool for viewers to fast and easily support content creators.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago

We have a support button that can be shown on videos to provide instructions on how to support a channel (for instance with Liberapay). I don't know what you had in mind that would the integration would be like, but please share it on https://ideas.joinpeertube.org/. Most probably it could be solved through a simple plugin.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago (7 children)

First of all, thanks for doing this.

Secondly, the friction of using PeerTube is more than any other application within the Fediverse. Even subscribing doesn't follow a sane UX with the button randomly appearing at the bottom of the screen. Do you not think that mirroring something closer to the YouTube UX would minimise friction?

Thirdly, can you please create a tool that will scrape my YouTube subscriptions and look for their PeerTube channels, so I actually have a reason to open the app. Finding content is still really really really hard.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Hi! Nothing to ask but I just wanted to let you know I appreciate your work!

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago (3 children)

One thing that might get more content creators on PeerTube could be “advertising” as not just a video platform, but also a backup service.

I’m guessing most content creators have their original video and video project files backed up somewhere. Why not have the ability to use PeerTube for that?

You can already have PeerTube store the original video file, when you upload it, something YouTube can’t do.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Have you ever discussed about PeerTube with big creators of news videos, e.g. Euronews, France 24, DW, etc?

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (9 children)

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?

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Thanks for your work!

What are your opinions on using open source algorithms to augment user retention?

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I'd like an easy way to keep seeding videos without leaving the page open

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