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!

  • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
    6·
    1 day 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!

  • helvetpuli@sopuli.xyz
    5·
    1 day 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.

  • iddqd404@lemmy.mlEnglish
    10·
    1 day ago

    (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!

  • JoYo@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    what are the problems that need solutions for mobile uploads to be supported?

    i do music video production entirely on ipad and have yet to find an aapp that supports mobile uploads. the web UI never seems to complete the upload.

  • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.eeEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    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.

  • atlien51@lemm.ee
    71·
    1 day ago

    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
      6·
      1 day ago

      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.

      • atlien51@lemm.ee
        3·
        1 day ago

        With websites like this I find that there needs to be strong moderation. Cause stupid people try to upload all kinds of gross shit thinking oh I’ll get away with it bc it’s a small website & I’ll overwhelm them

        • AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space
          3·
          1 day ago

          100℅ with you there, I had to struggle with some people trying the weirdest shit on my PeerTube instance, including repeated attempts at ban evasion. Things got better ever since I made registration manually approved only again, though. Even just fencing it off behind “willing and able to write a few coherent words” helps a lot.

  • defolos_tech@lemmy.world
    8·
    1 day ago

    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 !

  • Penny7@lemm.ee
    7·
    2 days ago

    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)?

    • AbnormalHumanBeing@lemmy.abnormalbeings.space
      7·
      2 days ago

      Not Framasoft or affiliated with them. Depending on how long ago your attempt was, their Sepia Search tool may be what you are looking for. That search index has also become the main search option for many instances and it’s definitely a lot better than the options a few years ago.

      That being said, discoverability is still a problem. Search algorithms are actually deceptively hard to create and optimise - and with no personalised algorithm, creating a good experience needs more invested time and work at the moment (finding and adding subscriptions).

      Speaking of algorithms, there’s a promising project with a lot of potential: PeerTube Picks, which currently is in the form of a Firefox add-on that implements a very basic personalised algorithm, which, anecdotally, has helped me discover a few channels/videos I would have otherwise missed. There’s also !peertube@lemmy.world and !peertube@lemmy.wtf to find and share videos, channels and playlists, although that is of course kind of word of mouth, still.

      • Penny7@lemm.ee
        2·
        21 hours ago

        I was looking at it around the beginning of this year, so it would have been with Sepia. And if you search something simple like ‘sewing’ or ‘movies’ you shouldn’t get topics such as modern politics as your top results. That’s not just out of left field, that is a whole different ballpark. If I did a search for ‘sewing’ and got embroidery results…ok. Same game, just different position. Makes a bit more sense. You’re still stitchin’.

        Also, using something like ‘literature’ shouldn’t get you the same top results as ‘sewing’ does.

        SUPER FRUSTRATING!!!

  • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    1131·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      50·
      2 days ago

      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!

      • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        14·
        2 days ago

        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?

        • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
          21·
          2 days ago

          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).

          • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            13·
            2 days ago

            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.

    • Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      34·
      2 days ago

      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

      • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
        20·
        2 days 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).

  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtf
    361·
    2 days ago

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

    • Framasoft@lemmy.worldOP
      25·
      2 days 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.