this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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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!

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[–] plule@jlai.lu 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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!!

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[–] keepthepace@slrpnk.net 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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?

[–] AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It's barebones and very much a WIP - and not official - but for PeerTube, there is PeerTube Picks, a Firefox add-on, that tries to provide a very simple "algorithm" experience, which may grow to become what you are looking for.

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[–] ademir@lemmy.eco.br 8 points 5 days ago

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?

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

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!

[–] Penny7@lemm.ee 6 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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)?

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[–] atlien51@lemm.ee 5 points 5 days ago (3 children)

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

[–] AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Don't know about what's on Odyssey - but content on PeerTube is pretty neat, in my opinion - if you like Linux, FLOSS, tinkering and in general, people making videos out of being passionate about something. Also occasional weirdness, and also an increasing amount of "normal" content, at least I had that feeling in the past weeks.

Check !peertube@lemmy.world and !peertube@lemmy.wtf for a rough overview of what to expect and recommendations.

But it is of course also a miniscule amount of content when compared to the giants. And if you go on the wrong instances, there definitely are spammers and grifters to be found. But usually, they get excluded from trustworthy instances.

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[–] medem@lemmy.wtf 9 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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?

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 9 points 6 days ago

The main thing is our documentation https://docs.joinpeertube.org/. Basic install should be really fine.

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[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 9 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Just came to say Thank You!

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

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)
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[–] neblem@lemmy.world 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 9 points 6 days ago

We prefer monthly donations because they help us maintain financial stability throughout the year, whereas one-time donations tend to come in mainly when we run fundraising campaigns like this one (which means that some months our cash flow is low).

Thank you for your support!

[–] Marty_TF@lemmy.zip 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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

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[–] HotsauceHurricane@lemmy.world 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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?

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[–] lambipapp@lemmy.world 10 points 6 days ago (3 children)

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

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[–] helvetpuli@sopuli.xyz 3 points 5 days ago

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.

[–] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 8 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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

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[–] liaizon@social.wake.st 9 points 6 days ago (7 children)

@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?

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago

We're not aware of this federation issue. So yes, please, describe the problem at https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues and we'll look into it!

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[–] double_quack@lemm.ee 2 points 4 days ago

Are you hiring? How can I get professionally involved?

[–] pseudo@jlai.lu 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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?

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[–] spv@lemmy.spv.sh 7 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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?

[–] AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I'm not from Framasoft, but those speeds should work well enough for personal projects, depending on what resolutions you want to provide the videos at - but in general, the video compression + P2P sharing of people watching the video + other Servers potentially providing redundancy if your content goes "viral" at some point should make this easily possible with those upload speeds.

Also check the question + answers here, which is relevant to your situation: https://lemmy.spv.sh/post/8543/15298

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[–] sexy_peach@feddit.org 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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?

[–] Framasoft@lemmy.world 8 points 6 days ago

I think we are indeed more efficient, more agile and adaptive than larger orgs, but it's probably also because we were lucky enough to have many very skilled team mates :)

However, it also means that not everything is as polished as some bigger players, but we think we manage to give the best value for the price!

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