![[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}
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!
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?
I don’t think we have been. Thing is, we do not know of many organizations that are identical to us in other countries: we’re not really a Linux or FLOSS group, and we don’t lobby governments or other institutions. In some ways, we’re similar to Disroot which also offers services as we do, but since we do quite a lot of other stuff (developing PeerTube, producing commons, sharing knowledge, and we even have a publishing house!)
Even if we have been working with a lot of partners, most of them are French and on very specific topics.
If people want to join forces on the FLOSS-software-hosting services topic, maybe look into something similar to the (very french) CHATONS (and possibly https://libreho.st/, but it’s no longer active to our knowledge).
On the topic of contributing to develop things together, we’re not doing much apart from PeerTube (we only have two developers, and both are working nearly fully on PeerTube).
hi from the Mastodon team, we’d love to work more closely with you in the future on Fediverse and freedom related topics 🙂 also, I am personally a big fan of PeerTube, and think the work you do is fantastic! 🐙
Hi!
Thank you so much for your kind words!
Feel free to send us a message through our contact form whenever you want to talk about a specific topic! We’re always interested to talk with other Fediverse project so we can try to provide softwares!
https://contact.framasoft.org/en/
We hope to hear from you soon!
Thank you for the answer, that makes a lot of sense. I think the very unique structure and goals you have developed have served you well, since PeerTube might be one of the best fleshed-out projects in the Fediverse space, at least in my opinion.
Thanks for your kind words!
Collab with arte would be great?
I believe they have their own player already, so unsure what would be their direct interest, but the PeerTube ecosystem could be useful to them anyway. For instance there’s a big French institution that uses PeerTube runner for their video transcription tasks (and paid for specific features), but doesn’t use the PeerTube server or player at all.
That is a good question to which I have to direct answer I guess.
arte is a media producer and server at the same time. Peertube provides the fundament for serving videos. To me it sounds like there should be a big overlap.
arte already has build their system but let’s think big and long term, not only one year ahead. Arte could use a peertube backend (with extra steps) and focus on what they do best, producing content. By adjust peertube to their needs, other broadcasters could use it as well and many would profit. The broadcasters could easily share selected media with others, making the services interconnected. The user wouldn’t need many accounts for France Télévisions, ARD and others. The user wouldn’t need 5 apps for the same type of media.
Copyright law would be in the way, Arte content is only available in France, Germany and parts of Switzerland. I have to use a VPN to even get their youtube videos, which are otherwise geofenced.