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!

  • Penny7@lemm.ee
    6·
    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·
        1 day 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!!!