[AMA] We're Framasoft, we develop PeerTube, ask us anything!

Ggghh

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.

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)

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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?

Thanks for your work!

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

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

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!

Thank you for your amazing works.

Are you planning on implementing a privacy friendly recommendation algorithm? It would ideally run locally on the client's device.

edit: Oh and, if you haven't seen it yet, please see the PM I sent you.

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

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.

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?

Thank you for doing this!

I love your guys work and fully support it. I think libre software is the only way foward if we don't want worse and worse platforms.

Question: Do you think Peertube will likely ever have a the diversity of content that YouTube has or with different motives for making content it may never reach that scale?

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.)

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

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?

I want to run a PT instance that just mirrors 100% of the CC-licensed videos on YouTube, so folks using Tor and VPNs can access it.

I'm not looking to make money, but I do need to cover the monthly costs of the server. What methods are available to monetize the site? Is there some plugin that can simply inject (privacy friendly) pre-watch ads?

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

Merci pour votre travail, c'est génial ! 👏💪

Have you ever thought about offering compute capabilities (with OpenLambda for ex) or hosting web services ? I'd personnally pay for that, and there's a need for European cloud alternatives !

(Not a question) I have used services hosted by Framasoft many times, but I wasn't aware that you were also the developers of PeerTube! I have almost stopped using Y*utube and I've been trying to use PeerTube more and more. The main hurdle is finding content, which I'm sure will get easier and easier as the platform gets adopted and known in the fediverse and beyond. Congratulations for you efforts promoting Free and Libre software, keep up the good work!

What is the authoritative source of information for learning how to run an instance of peertube and how difficult is it for a moderately skilled sysadmin to do so?

Just came to say Thank You!

I've been using FramaGit ever since Github went Microsoft.

@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?

will you try to modernize the office suit (framacalc etc) like you did peertube?

Will the peertube app get tablet support soon?

Thank you! Would you ever consider employing developers elsewhere in EU to work on the apps & services?

Love your work on Peertube!

Why doesn’t the penguin have a snorkel? Why does he need to bring the animals under the water? Why is the elephant on the other side?

I may still have a pdf listing free software (or just games?) somewhere that you were writing from nearly two decades ago, and still today you provide so many great resources. Thank you!!

The most exciting feature of having the same protocol, IMHO, is to be able to access the same channels with different kind of interfaces. Accessing Peertube channel as an Lemmy Community, or a Mastodon profile. The user is able to chose how they prefer to consume content. Are there plans to promote better integration between different platforms?

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

Do you think that the ability to browse content without an account is a differentiating factor to the fediverse?
Would a content creator be able to attract lurking non-fedi user using that capacity?

I've been following all of your projects for two decades. I just want to say: un énorme merci!

Hey I just want to say that I love your work! Truly inspirational. I think that it shows that small teams can work better in some respects as larger orgs. Is this something that you are seeing as well?

Hey. I'm part of the ad hoc team which is assembling to continue development of Mobilizon. So far it's just a tiny group based out of Lyon France, but we're growing.

Are you willing to provide us at least some small guarantee of access to Thomas for advice and explanations about the decisions he made about the architecture and what direction it should take? I know that her already answers queries, but I worry that it's on his own time.

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?

Oh, and, of course a very important second question from me: What are your favourite dinosaurs?

Hi! One day I want to move from YouTube to PeerTube (in the process of getting some things done before I do) and when I was trying to explore it, one thing that frustrated me was trying to search for anything on the platform.

I tried to do a searches for random topics and the top search results instances/servers that had nothing to do with what I was looking for.

This frustration was also echoed by somebody with experience on the platform that I ended up talking with. They were able to direct me to the specific instances I'd want because they're a part of them too, but it shouldn't be so difficult to find what you want, so my question is are you trying to fix the search engine on your platform to make it more user friendly so that most of your platform isn't seemingly word of mouth (so to speak)?

IIRC WebTorrent support is removed. Is torrenting completely off the table?

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.

Will the official PeerTube app for Android ever adopt Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, and Material 3 Expressive?

What are your plans to improve the user experience?

Hi! Thank you for all your work :)

I'm wondering if 30 seconds is a reasonable latency for live streaming on a raspberry pi 5 instance ?

And if I want to store the videos on another drive, is it so simple as just changing the path for "/var/www/peertube/storage" in the production.yaml file ?

Finally, is it possible to connect to the live session chat with another fediverse instance (mastodon or lemmy) ?

Are you hiring? How can I get professionally involved?

Salut! Ca va? (Learning French)

Hey, guys, I know I'm too late to the party, but my city just announced that they spent half a million dollars of Microsoft office licenses last year. I think that's nuts. I want to try to persuade them to switch non-power-users to LibreOffice suite and reduce their office licenses by over 90%. Do you have any advice, examples, or selling points that can help me persuade them to cut Microsoft office licenses instead of literal firefighters? And, seeing as this is late, I'd welcome anybody answering. Thanks!

Hello guys! Congratulations for your work on so many services! I have a question about Mobilizon: if I want to see events from Bucharest, is there a way to see events from all the instances, or do I have to search on each instance? Thank you!

Not sure if it's a question. I was looking into PT, but there aren't hardly any instances that are 1. open and 2. have much activity. Also, it seemed like you only got the content on the instance, it wasn't easy at all to find non-local content.

(Also, most of it was playthroughs)

Do you believe in the fediverse's ability to compete or to replace the current the social media environnement either from a technical perspective or from the dynamic of the environment?
If so, would it be a close remplacement or will it change deeply the way people use social media?

Same question specifically for PeerTube.

Do you have privacy-promotion organisations you would like to recommend (whatever language they are speaking)?

What could you recommend to a privacy enthusiast that want to turn they privacy literacy into work-related competence?

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

Will your games eventually support mobile-first concepts? I've tried the first handful of your framagames offerings and none of them work on a mobile phone. If that is indicative of your overall work, I fear the only users you'll attract will be staunch keyboard and desktop users. While that was the norm 20 years ago when you started, the landscape has changed. Today, most users' primary and only compute device is their mobile phone. Please consider expanding your reach and accommodating the needs of today's audience.

Will you guys add þe ability to login to an instance þat isn’t provided in þe app already into þe ios app?

Est-ce que vous allez ajouter la possibilité de se connecter à une instance qui n'est pas fournie dans l'application déjà dans l'application ios?

Why make a peertube client isn't of partnering with an app the already does peertube?

Why doesn't framasoft monetize by providing hosted instances of PT?

Is landscape mode coming to Peertube app on iOS?

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.

Thank you for making such a solid platform!

Kikou @Framasoft 👋

- (When) is PeerTube going to move away from (Microsoft's) Github?
- Is it expected for the PeerTube mobile app users to have an account on a PeerTube instance or will there possibly be in the future "local subscriptions" to channels stored in the app, a feed of videos from the pinned instances, maybe even commenting using a microbloging account…? Maybe that's a different app, for someone else to make. 🤔