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!

Sorry! I (Hi, I am Booteille) totally forgot to add the explanation comment!

Here we go:

PeerTube is a decentralized and federated alternative to YouTube. The goal of PeerTube is not to replace YouTube but to offer a viable alternative using the strength of ActivityPub and P2P protocols.

Being built on ActivityPub means PeerTube is able to be part of a bigger social network, the Fediverse (the Federated Universe). On the other hand, P2P technologies help PeerTube to solve the issue of money, inbound with all streaming platform : With PeerTube, you don't need to have a lot of bandwidth available on your server to host a PeerTube platform because all users (which didn't disable the feature) watching a video on PeerTube will be able to share this same video to other viewers.

If you are curious about PeerTube, I can't recommend you enough to check the official website to learn more about the project. If after that you want to try to use PeerTube as a content creator, you can try to find a platform available there to register or host yourself your own PeerTube platform on your own server.

The development of PeerTube is actually sponsored by Framasoft, a french non-for-profit popular educational organization, a group of friends convinced that an emancipating digital world is possible, convinced that it will arise through actual actions on real world and online with and for you!

Framasoft is also involved in the development of Mobilizon, a decentralized and federated alternative to Facebook Events and Meetup.

If you want to contribute to PeerTube, feel free to:

• report bugs and give your feedback on Github or on our forums
• submit your brillant ideas on our Feedback platform
• Help to translate the software, following the contributing guide
• Make a donation to help to pay bills inbound in the development of PeerTube.

Because we're a very small team, and we're okay with it staying this way. Not all of us are speaking English correctly. Having a worldwide audience would mean communicating in English all the time, providing assistance in English.

Also, we want to grow at a pace that suits us. We would much prefer if there were other organizations doing exactly the same thing as us in other countries that we could refer people to.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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).

Yes, you can setup an instance yourself and activate redundancy for the instances you'd like to help : https://docs.joinpeertube.org/admin/following-instances#platforms-redundancy

Thanks!

We did not plan such a thing for now, but we know some people have been working on this, see for instance : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/peertube-picks/ https://github.com/solidheron/peertube_recomendation_algorythm/

If you have details on how it would work in your idea, feel free to share thoughts on https://ideas.joinpeertube.org/ if it's not already done.

Oh, sorry to hear this. We'll make sure to follow your observations to the team.

As we can now afford to pay designers, some parts of the interface are being improved, but it's a slow progress. Here are some resources on our work in v7: https://joinpeertube.org/news/share-ressources

About finding your favorite YouTube creators on PeerTube, this is still hard, as they're probably aren't as much as you think they'd be, if you think the scraping tool would be very useful. Using browser extensions such as https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/peertube-companion/ or https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/peertubeify/ which redirect you to a PeerTube version of a YouTube video could give you a view of the content currently on both platforms.

Otherwise, accounts such as Fedivideo mentioned in this thread are doing a very good job to curate content you might like, and we want to help that (with our limited resources).

Sadly no, right now we don't really have the time to approach these types of organizations and try to make partnerships. However, there is the possibility for a hosting provider offering PeerTube as a solution to contact them and make them a complete offer.

No, because the PeerTube app uses Flutter: https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube/mobile-application

We're fine on giving people the choice to use the algorithm they want. Today our « Hot » sorting type is using a derivative of Reddit's old algorithm, but we could add new ones. However, it takes time to focus on this topic, so it's not a priority.

Hi!

We're currently working on an "official" app! More information about what we're working on this year on the PT blog: https://joinpeertube.org/news/peertube-future-2024

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).

Are you talking about those kind of concrete steps?

For now, it's mostly only the possibility writing in the "About" page of the server ways to support it, possibly with a banner above videos to encourage people to give money. Creators can also add a "Support" button below videos to tell viewers how to support them.

But I think some people are working on requiring people to login and have a subscription to view videos.

I don't know of an existing plugin that injects pre-roll ads, but it could probably already be developed with the current available APIs.