[AMA] We're Framasoft, we develop PeerTube, ask us anything!

How does it seed videos anyway? I'm not familiar with this feature of Peertube, is it using Bittorrent? if so one could just use any Bittorrent client assuming Peertube exposes the magnet link (they really should).

CC: @Framasoft@lemmy.world @moonpiedumplings@programming.dev

I think a browser extension, similar to tor snowflake would be a good way to do this.

Thank you for your feedback and your kind words!

Merci beaucoup ! 🥰

We're already hosting a lot of services for free! You can check https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/ to find out which services we provide.

There are also services we experiment on https://framalab.org/fr/

Finally, we're providing free Nextcloud hosting for thousands (~2200 as for now. We expect to reach 10 000 during next years) of non-for-profits: https://www.frama.space/abc/fr/

All of these is possible thanks to the donations of thousands of people!

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.

You could upload content to make it better !

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.

Hi! Are you talking about the player or the whole app?

If you're talking about the whole app, we do not plan to support it for now except for future tablets versions.

Hi!

Could you please explain your problem in details on our dedicated forum or Github? This way, our devs would be able to investigate your issue!

Thanks!

Hi!

• We already use both Github and Framagit (the gitlab instance we host and freely accessible to anyone). We host all of our code on Framagit and only a few projects on Github.
• You can already use use a local account on the PeerTube app. With a local account you can't comment videos but you can subscribe to channels or create playlists! Concerning using a microblogging account, we do not plan to support other Fediverse accounts (such as Mastodon) for now. So yes, that could be a community project instead!

What the fuck was the point of your comment?

I think you must have gotten unlucky there, which does highlight a real problem of discoverability/onboarding. There definitely are instances, which provide (easy) access to more of the overall PeerTube ecosystem. To self-promote, mine for example is connected to 782 other platforms at the time of this writing, and utilises a global search index (like a lot of instances do). As another example, peertube.wtf is connected to a whopping 1086 other platforms, due to being in the game longer and following an overall more permissive moderation policy.

It's regrettable that turned out to be your experience with PeerTube, and it does highlight an issue with onboarding/discoverability - but it is not necessarily the most common experience people have with PT. Although, I must admit, there is no representative surveying or anything, so I can't be sure what the most common experience is.

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!

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

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.

Nice, thank you ! Subscribed to the channel :-)

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).

Not Framasoft, but here's a few ideas on monetizing:

The software allows you to post a "Support" button under the video with links for donations, etc. It also allows you to upload platform member only (internal) and password protected videos that you could charge access via another means to unlock.

Plugins can be added by admins to add monetization more directly as well. For example https://github.com/kontrollanten/peertube-plugin-premium-users is an attempt adds the ability to have premium videos with Stripe as the payment processor/verifier.

Admins can also soft fork and add in whatever customizations to enable monetization too as long as they adhere to the AGPL terms.

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.

Thanks!

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).

They have sepiasearch to search peertube instances. The drawback is that only specific instances are searchable, because of dubious contents on some instances.

https://sepiasearch.org/search

I find Fedivideo is quite a good place to start finding stuff. But would be interested to hear from Framasoft their ideas. https://fedi.video/

There’s honestly not many content creators on PeerTube from YouTube and I’m not sure how a tool like that would even work.

Thanks a lot!

That's an idea (and some content creators kind of already do that if YouTube unpublishes their video for some reason), but it's not very selling as an idea. Being independent from fake companies claiming the rights to some content is a selling point, though.

Id be against advertising on peertube, advertising is to mighten overproducers to overgrip peertube inhold. Inhold should rather be made on the grounds of the meaningful, and design should eyen how to forward the meaningful.

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.

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).

Collab with arte would be great?

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.

See our answer at https://lemmy.world/post/30376256/17325191

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.

what does augmenting user retention mean in practice?

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.

Thanks for being there!

We don't think PeerTube will directly replace YouTube at some point, but we do think that some organizations, media outlets, and content creators may not have the same level of interest in posting on YouTube as they do today. For all of them, we hope they will find PeerTube to be a good fit.

Hi!

1. The wizard is still not designed, but yes we think it will include federation settings so it's easier for institutions or private instances to setup a "safe" PeerTube instance.
2. We're actually evaluating alternative softwares for Framadate, with mobile support as a required feature. We'll tell more about it once we're ready!

Not part of Framasoft, but I am administrating a PeerTube platform/instance myself, and can anecdotally say, that it works rather well. Another factor is, that as an admin, you can set up to automatically mirror videos on other instances, when they meet certain criteria.

For example, I have ~300GB set aside to mirror trending, new and most-watched videos of some instances, that I consider to have quality (EDIT: and reliably non-illegal) content regularily (e.g. spectra.video, makertube.net, peertube.wtf, etc.) That way, in addition to just users watching videos acting as a seeding peer via webtorrent, my own dedicated server in Finland among other professional servers with large bandwith also add to the resilience of the network, even for smaller instances.

Anecdotally, I have also heard of some people running a PeerTube instance successfully from just a SBC, like a RaspPi or similar, from home, utilising the WebTorrent integratio you mentioned EDIT: As I have learned, while they are using P2P connections, it is no longer the WebTorrent protocol to their advantage. Here's a video I remember talking about this as an example.

The P2P system in PeerTube works very well if you have many concurrent viewers. You can have more information in our blogpost that details a P2P stress test: https://joinpeertube.org/news/stress-test-2023 But if most of the time you don't have many concurrent viewers, you'll still have to pay the bandwidth. But as you can see in the blog post above, PeerTube is not very expensive to host (if you don't have to store many videos).

There’s nothing stopping you installing PeerTube on your own home server and uploading your videos to that.

If your internet bandwidth is low, you can have other PeerTube servers mirror your videos.

So when someone watches your videos, it will not only download the data from your home server, but also from other PeerTube servers that mirror your videos.

It won’t reduce server storage usage, because the video needs to be placed somewhere, but it will reduce bandwidth and traffic usage.

Some PeerTube websites have Sepia Search enabled, so fx from PeerTube.wtf, you can search through 1000+ servers.

Also not Framasoft, but for your search question their Sepia Search https://sepiasearch.org/ would be your best bet to get hits across known Peertube instances/platforms.

Your favorite Peertube instance/platform has its own front page, and they've done a bit of work in the Android app to have an explore tab to have similar across its tracked instances.

Hi!

We're not for now but we'd probably look for a full-stack dev in the future! Nothing sure yet!

Keep an eye on our social media if you're interested in this position!

online I still prefer to use a language that almost everyone speaks

i wonder how many languages this mindset would kill off

ehm no, fuck english

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.

That's a pretty fat pipe, cool

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

GIGABIT per SECOND?!?!!! i will blow you to mirror my videos once i set up an instance

eye contact too

Not Framasoft or affiliated with them, but I am running an instance myself. If you have a FQDN and can set up a PeerTube server with federation enabled utilising the bandwith behind it, there are settings to automatically mirror and seed videos from other instances. For example, my server currently has ~300GB which it utilises to automatically pull trending, new and most-watched videos from trusted instances to mirror and seed as a redundancy.

Setting this up is relatively easy, basically just uncommenting and specifying stuff in a config text file. Besides that you could disable user registrations and anything else, maybe the web interface altogether, and just let it do the mirroring. At least AFAIK, there doesn't seem to be a way to do this, without setting up PeerTube with Fedaration enabled first, though. But maybe they will provide additional info I haven't learned yet!

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.

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.

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!

Hope it helps!

Hello!

Yes, we're actually working on modernizing our de-google-ify suit! However, it'll take time since we need to review each service and identify what are our needs and how we can fit them! Do we need to develop new features for an existing software? Are we able to do so? Is there a new software fully fitting our needs? Or maybe there are other promising softwares but not ready yet?

There are a lot of things to consider, especially when we're talking of services being used by 2M people each month!

Hi!

We're actually considering hiring a new full-stack developer in the future (to work on all of our services, not on PeerTube) and that would be possible for us to hire someone leaving in another country if:

• the person accepts a French salary-level
• the person speaks French (a big part of our team does not speak English)

Keep watching our posts on our social media, so you won't miss the announce!---

Yup, we're been there a while! <3

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

Not Framasoft, or affiliated with them - but I managed to set it up from basically having 0 practical experience and only very basic, non-professional knowledge. I'd say it's not especially hard, and compared with setting up Lemmy and Mastodon, I'd even call it easy, personally.

I'd say the definitive source is the online docs, with a good installation guide included:

https://docs.joinpeertube.org/

https://docs.joinpeertube.org/install/any-os