Once again this year, we asked David Revoy to illustrate our year-end campaign. And on this last day of 2023, it’s time to give a little nod to this important work!
đŠ VS đ: Let’s take back some ground from the tech giants!
Cliquez sur l’image pour soutenir l’ensemble des mascottes de Framasoft – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
An animated donation bar
Did you notice? The monsters started the campaign very serenely, enjoying grilled data skewers. But as you donated more and more, they became more than a little concerned…
Our cheerful mascots face off against some rather repulsive Datavöres
Each Framasoft mascot, representing one of our projects, stood up to a monstrous, unattractive GAFAM. But did you notice that our mascots were showing signs of life?
Once again, we’d like to extend our warmest thanks to David Revoy, who has been working with us since 2017 to illustrate our work and hopes with talent, heart and intelligence.
Speaking of success, last night, we’ve reached our fundraising goal to meet our 2024 budget!
We’d like to take this last day of our review to thank all those who have worked, discussed, shared, supported, encouraged, criticized… and contributed to our actions. The Internet isn’t big enough to mention all of you at least as much as you deserve, but you know who you are and from the depths of our little hearts we modestly say: thank you.
Thanks ! – Clock to visit the « Support Framasoft » website
Thanks to you, we’ll have the means to continue our work over the coming year (well, if some of you want to give us a bit more means, we won’t say no… but that’s not the point!). Above all, thanks to you, we feel supported.
We hope you have a wonderful end to the year, and we send you ou best wishes of emancipation, joy and freedom in 2024,
The members of the Framasoft association
Framasoft in figures, 2023 edition
What is the concrete impact of our associationâs actions? Thatâs the question we like to answer at the end of the year: taking the time to quantify our actions is essential if we are to realise the service we can provide to others. Letâs get ready for Framastats 2023!
đŠ VS đ: Let’s take back some ground from the tech giants!
Click to support us and help push back Hydrooffice – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
As for our online servicesâŠ
More than 1.8 million people visit our websites every month: thatâs twice as many people as visit Disneyland Paris every month! This figure is up 16% on last year, so itâs pretty crazy (and very motivating) to think that what we do is useful to so many people. And what about service by service?
Framadate allows you to create mini-surveys, for example to find the right appointment time. And in figures, Framadate is:
33,785,780 visits in 2023
1.2 million hosted surveys in 2023
80,000 more surveys created than in 2022
Graph showing the number of visits (blue) and page views (orange) to Framadate
Framapad
Framapad allows several people to write on the same document. Framapad is undoubtedly one of the largest Etherpad services in the world, with:
510,900 pads currently hosted
Several million pads hosted since the launch of the service
309,000 accounts on MyPads (+ 60,000 compared to 2022)
More than 5 million visits in 2023
Graph showing the distribution of pads according to our Framapad instances (annual, bimonthly, weekly, half-yearly, monthly pads and Mypads accounts).
Framalistes and Framagroupes
Framalistes and Framagroupes allow you to create email discussion lists. As the Framalistes server had reached its maximum capacity, we opened Framagroupes in June 2023 to continue offering this service, which we consider essential. Framalistes and Framagroupes are undoubtedly the largest discussion list servers in existence (excluding the web giants), with:
more than 1.1 million users
63,900 open lists
An average of 280,000 messages sent per working day
Framaforms
Framaforms makes it easy to create online forms. Framaforms in figures:
867,000 visits per month
418,628 forms currently hosted
172.289 forms created this year
Graph showing the evolution of visits (blue) and page views (orange) to Framforms (it’s going up!)
Framacalc
Framacalc allows you to create collaborative spreadsheets. It may also be the largest Ethercalc database in the world, with:
4,235,879 visits in 2023
218,000 hosted spreadsheets
Graph showing the number of visits (blue) and page views (orange) to Framacalc
Framateam
Framateam is a chat service that allows teams to be organised by channel. It is probably one of the largest public Mattermost instances in the world, with:
148,870 users of the service (5,582 of which log on daily)
29,665 teams
168,102 discussion channels
More than 43 million messages exchanged since the launch of the service
Graph showing the distribution of messages sent to Framateam over a month (note the very high usage during the week!).
Framagit
Framagit is a software forge where developers can publish their code and contribute to the code of others. Framagit is probably one of the largest public Gitlab servers in France, with:
70,679 hosted projects
49,642 users
8,966 forks
149,789 issues
91,623 merge requests
1,764,909 commit notes
Screenshot of the Framagit homepage
Framacarte
Framacarte allows you to create maps online. And in figures, itâs:
2,770,510 visits in 2023
6,690 users (+ 1,246 in one year)
170,845 hosted maps (+ 33,476 in one year)
Graph showing the number of visits (blue) and page views (orange) to Framacarte
Framatalk
Framatalk allows you to create or join a video conference room. And in numbers, thatâs
656,765 visits in 2023 (+45% compared to last year)
An average of 75 active conferences with 200 participants per working day
Graph showing the number of visits (blue) and page views (orange) to Framatalk (note the huge spike during the year of lockdowns!)
Framindmap
Framindmap allows you to create mind maps. In numbers, Framindmap is:
295,379 visits in 2023
1.13 million hosted mind maps
489,690 users
Graph showing the number of visits (blue) and page views (orange) to Framindmap
Framavox
Framavox allows a group of people to meet, discuss and make decisions in one place. Framavox is probably one of the largest existing instances of the excellent Loomio software, with:
Framadrive, the document storage service, is no longer open for registration, but itâs still working! And in numbers, thatâs:
10.8 million files
4,794 users
2.6 TB of storage used
Framapiaf
Framapiaf, an installation of the microblogging software Mastodon, is no longer open to new registrations, but remains very active. In figures, there are:
1,500 users who have registered in the last 30 days
850 users who have posted at least one message in the last 30 days
The care given to our online services – Illustration by David Revoy
Technical infrastructure
To the best of our knowledge, Framasoft is the worldâs largest web host for online services. And a priori, this associative operating model doesnât exist anywhere else! In figures:
58 servers and 60 virtual machines hosting our online services
0.6 tonnes of CO2 equivalent for the annual electricity consumption of our technical infrastructure (our host, Hetzner, uses renewable hydro and wind energy)
1 full-time sysadmin and 2 technical support staff
The online services we provide to the public are not the only things that keep us busy. Here are some figures on some of the other things weâve been up to this year.
Itâs thanks to your donations that we can guarantee the total financial independence of the association: the freedom to experiment, to continue, to fail, to stop, to continue our projects, from the most serious to the most mad, always in line with our associative project of popular education on digital issues and the cultural commons. And in figures:
93% of our budget comes from donations
5,463 donors finance initiatives that benefit more than 1.8 million people every month
70% of the budget is spent on salaries
Breakdown of Framasoft’s budget (in order: Human resources, Servers and domains, Operating costs, Interventions, Communication, Project services, Bank charges and tax)
Once again this year, we need you, your support, your sharing to help us regain ground on the toxic GAFAM web and multiply the number of ethical digital spaces.
If we want to balance our budget for 2024, we only have 3 days left to raise âŹ48 000: we canât do it without your help!
There was one more present left at the foot of the Christmas tree… The French free software directory and founding project of Framasoft is evolving once again, into a site that’s nicer, simpler, more ergonomic… and a lot more practical for recommending your favourite free software!
đŠ VS đ: Let’s take back some ground from the tech giants!
There was one more present left at the foot of the Christmas tree⊠The free software directory and founding project of Framasoft is evolving once again, into a site thatâs nicer, simpler, more ergonomic⊠and a lot more practical for recommending your favourite free software!
So, for people who were used to the previous version of Framalibre, we warn you: itâs going to leave a gap⊠You have every right to exclaim âbut whereâs all my junk?â ⊠But for many newcomers to the world of free software, that was the problem!
Maiwann has done a lot of usability testing for us, especially at conferences and at the stands where we meet. These tests helped her to realise, for example, that putting a simple âmailâ label on the home page wasnât helping people who were âlooking for an alternative to Gmailâ.
So for this new version, weâve made a radical choice: simplicity. So weâve gone to great lengths to simplify menus, sub-menus, drop-down menus, labels, boxes, notes, buttons, and so on.
This radical choice for simplicity came at a price: we had to refocus the Framalibre directory on digital tools. The previous version wanted to open up to free culture, objects and structures. But the problem with doing a bit of everything is that itâs hard to do everything well: presenting all open source resources meant multiplying menus and categories, while increasing the complexity of creating a listing.
The new Framalibre site is deliberately bare bones. It welcomes you with a page displaying tags (the most frequently used search terms) and a search bar. Goodbye the meta-categories, categories, sub-categories and sub-category filters⊠In short, the tree structure inherited from the 2001 directory!
Our aim is to respond as quickly as possible to your need to find free software to do what you need to do, or to find an alternative to the service provided by the web giants that you want to free yourself from: you search, you find.
Results for Photoshop search on Framalibre 2024
đ Under the hood, the pages đ
Click on GNU and Tux to support Framalibre! – illustration David Revoy – LicenseâŻ: CC-By 4.0
For the more technical among you (the rest of you can skip straight to the next part ^^), this simplicity can also be found under the hood.
Framalibre 2017âs Drupal 7 needed a good upgrade, which takes time and energy. The entries database was difficult to access: while weâd done a good job of tinkering with something so that it could be used by others, we would have had to spend more time and energy developing a practical, documented APIâŠ
This choice of static allowed us to modify the structure of the entries and the database. Now written in markdown, these records can be read by both humans and scripts (as long as your robots remain well-behaved, of course :p). As the Framalibre records are CC-By SA, we hope that making them more accessible and readable will lead to some interesting re-uses!
Weâve also taken the opportunity to simplify the manuals as much as possible: you wonât find any screenshots of the software, for example. After a few years, these images are often outdated and misleading. From now on, the information presented in a manual will be simple and concise, and if you like this first look at a particular free software product, we invite you to find out more on the official website.
Entry for Krita on Framalibre 2024
đ âHere, this is what I use to free myselfâŠâ đ.
Click to support us and help to push back MS Blue Scream – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
Because our goal is not for you to stay on Framalibre as long as possible (yes, in the game of attention economy, Framasoft is frankly – and deliberately – bad đ ). On the contrary, Framalibre aims to be a mediator, a ramp to take you to the official site of the free tool that meets your needs.
In addition to being a search tool, we have designed this new Framalibre as a tool for recommending free and ethical alternatives. Whether itâs during the preliminary surveys and tests for this redesign of Framalibre, during the regular meetings we attend, or even when we look at how we operate ourselves⊠we observe the same constant:
Itâs much easier to adopt a free tool when it comes highly recommended by people we trust.
This is how we came up with the idea of adding a âused by Framasoft membersâ box at the top of certain search pages. This doesnât mean that other software isnât as good, or that it wonât meet your specific needs: it just shows the free software and services that we use regularly.
[capture mini-site]
đ Framalibre mini-sites: offer your choices! đ
With this new version of Framalibre, we wanted to go even further to encourage peer-to-peer recommendations. We know from experience that a person who uses free software today is a person who will help those around him or her to liberate their digital use tomorrow.
On the new Framalibre, you can make your own selection of free tools and get a link to a page that you can share with your friends and family!
Just for fun, here are a few examples weâve put together for you:
We look forward to hearing your choice of free tools!
GNU and Tux against MB Blue Scream – Illustration David Revoy – LicenseâŻ: CC-By 4.0
đ€ Collaboration is about sharing! đ€
Of course, Framalibre is and will remain a collaborative directory. Whether you want to add a record to the directory or correct an existing record, contributions are just a click away!
Whatâs more, weâve made the whole process a lot easier (you can see thereâs a theme here!). The downside is that your submissions will be reviewed by our team of moderators before they are published (rather than being moderated after submission, as was previously the case).
The upside is that there are already almost 1,019 entries to discover, like so many of the solutions that open source communities offer each of us to make our digital practices better.
And if you canât find the entry for that great free software or application that freed you from the web giants⊠feel free to add it: youâll see, itâs (unsurprisingly) easy!
So now itâs up to you!
Itâs up to you to use Framalibre to find, share and, above all, recommend the free tools that make your digital life easier⊠and life in general!
Because, yes, at the end of the year, we need you, your support and your sharing to help us regain ground on the toxic GAFAM web and create more ethical digital spaces.
So weâve asked David Revoy to help us present this on our âSupport Framasoftâ page, which we invite you to visit (because itâs beautiful) and above all to share as widely as possible:
If we are to balance our budget for 2024, we have just 5 days left to raise ⏠71 398 : we canât do it without your help !
EmancipâAsso : Ethical right down to your digits
Until 2022, the time spent on EmancipâAsso was mainly used to find funding for the project, set up and run a steering committee and organise training for ethical service providers, but it was in 2023 that the project really took off. Weâre well on the way to enabling associations that want to free themselves from the digital tools of the web giants to find structures that can support them in this transition.
đŠ VS đ: Let’s take back some ground from the tech giants!
Click to support us and push back Toxicloud – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
EmancipâAsso, a 4-part project
Conceived in 2021 in partnership with Animafac, co-piloted by a large number of organisations from the popular education, voluntary and digital sectors, and integrated into our roadmap âCollectivese Internet / Convivialise Internetâ, the main objective of the EmancipâAsso project is to bring together ethical digital service providers and voluntary organisations in need of support in their emancipatory digital transition.
In order to achieve its objective, the project will include 4 actions:
Training for providers of ethical online services;
An online course, a digital version of the training;
A website listing service providers who specialise in helping associations make the digital transition and providing a place for associations to help each other and share their needs;
A major communications campaign to encourage associations to recognise the contradiction of trying to change the world using the tools of capitalism.
Itâs been a busy year: the first 3 actions detailed above have now been completed! Weâll tell you all about them in the rest of this article.
Training suppliers of ethical digital services to support associations
Weâve come to the conclusion that there are very few ethical digital service providers offering solutions that really take into account the needs of voluntary organisations, and in particular the support required to make a successful transition to open source digital tools. The first stage of the EmancipâAsso project therefore aims to support the development of the skills of these actors through two mechanisms: training and an online course (MOOC).
A much-appreciated training course in January 2023
Once again, we would like to thank the 9 people who agreed to take part in this training session to share their expertise and exchange views with the participants. Their contributions were much appreciated (see below) and proved invaluable in providing a solid base of knowledge and resources for the production of the MOOC.
The satisfaction questionnaire we sent out to participants highlights the fact that, overall, the week was beneficial for everyone. For example, 35% of participants found the training very satisfactory, 60% fairly satisfactory and only one participant found the training fairly unsatisfactory.
The most popular teaching sequences were:
Carry out a digital diagnosis of an association
Developing your network and thinking about complementary work
Communicating and designing a service offer
User training and support/assistance
An overview of the digital uses of associations
Understand the non-profit sector
Establish a strategic dialogue with the association
(Satisfaction rate calculated on the basis of 5 criteria: quality of theoretical content, quality of practical content, quality of teaching approach, quality of facilitation tools and listening ability/availability).
We also asked participants how satisfied they were with other aspects of the training. And as the graph below shows, overall satisfaction was high, with a few rare exceptions.
However, we recognise that certain aspects could be improved:
encourage less top-down methods of knowledge transfer,
providing more practical work and exchange of practice
improving the coherence between the different interventions
using more appropriate premises.
And weâll do our best if we decide to run the course again in the future. But at the moment we donât have the funding to do so.
A full MOOC in December 2023
It took us almost a year to turn the training into a MOOC, but thatâs it: the online course âDeveloping a range of services to support voluntary organisations in their ethical digital transitionâ is now available on the CHATONS MOOC platform (only in French, sorry!). Mind you, the paint is still fresh and there are bound to be a few typos, but this online course, which is primarily aimed at organisations and individuals who already provide online services or who want to offer them to associations, will enable you to acquire a methodology and support techniques that go far beyond simply providing services.
The CHATONS #2 MOOC is broadly based on the educational sequence of the training course and allows you to navigate as you wish within 8 major themes, each of which offers several lessons and an MCQ (for self-assessment of acquired knowledge). Each lesson is structured around illustrated textual content and sometimes includes activities for you to complete. While we do not aim to be exhaustive, we have tried to summarise the state of knowledge on each topic and systematically include a âfurther readingâ section so that anyone wishing to delve deeper into the subject can consult additional resources.
The course is now open and anyone can join whenever they like: thereâs no registration period to keep to. In fact, you donât even need to register to view the lessons. However, we recommend that you create an account to take advantage of advanced features:
Access to self-assessment exercises in the form of multiple choice questions;
Access to the self-help forum
Track your progress through the course (so you can pick up a lesson where you left off, or keep track of your assessment results).
The key word here is autonomy. We want to give learners as much freedom as possible in their learning path: everyone can follow the lessons at their own pace and manage the time they devote to this MOOC.
As usual with Framasoft, all content created for this MOOC is released under a free CC-By-SA licence (some images and videos from third party sites are marked as such). We hope that it will evolve, especially thanks to the contributions and feedback on the support forum. This MOOC should therefore be seen as an organic, living community: it will grow if we take care of it. If there are missing resources, if an activity is off the mark, if a lesson is too long, we invite you to share your opinion and suggest improvements on the support forum.
A website to help associations get in touch with service providers, but thatâs not allâŠ
The first objective of the EmancipâAsso project was to enable ethical online service providers to develop their skills in supporting associations, but the second was to create an online space where associations could identify them. Thatâs why, right from the start of the project, we planned to create a website to bring people together. But before we could start creating the site, we had to create a graphic identity for EmancipâAsso.
A graphic identity and design đ
In September 2022, we asked a group of students to work on the creation of the graphic charter and visual identity for the EmancipâAsso project, as part of the supervised projects within the Colibre pro degree. After an initial phase in which the project was presented and our brief explained, 4 studentsâ es carried out a comparison of the graphic charters/visual identities of âneighbouringâ projects before drawing up a set of specifications presenting their analysis of the needs, from which they each developed a proposal for the graphic charter. One of these proposals met our expectations and served as the inspiration for our service provider, Thomas Nicolas (thanks to him), to create the logo.
The first is a directory of service providers able to support associations wishing to make the transition to open source digital tools.
By âsupportâ, we mean accompanying the association through all the stages necessary for its transition (co-development of a digital strategy, diagnosis and recommendations, implementation of these recommendations and assistance in getting to grips with the solutions deployed). We found that associations often had difficulty finding professionals who could provide this type of tailored support. Like many organisations, not-for-profits think in terms of âtoolsâ first, before thinking about a digital strategy to ensure a smooth transition (without having to return to the services of the web giants after a few months because they havenât thought through all the aspects of this transition). For this reason, associations will not find in this directory providers who only offer technical solutions. In fact, we have systematically asked service providers who have volunteered to be included in this directory to prove that they have already carried out several projects to support associations.
Click to support us and help Shane, Ămancip’Asso mascot â Illustration CC-By David Revoy
So far, 20 service providers are listed in this directory. Thatâs a start. Over the past month, we have been actively communicating with support professionals about the existence of this site. Whatâs more, weâre expecting service providers who have taken the training or the MOOC to register in the next few months. So itâs still a work in progress and you can access it. If you know of people or organisations that could be listed, please let us know.
The emancipasso.org website is also intended to be a gateway to a community where associations and other players in the emancipatory digital ecosystem can help and advise each other, share best practices and communicate their needs in terms of tools and/or functionalities so that development costs can be shared between several organisations. Based on the observation that associations, and in particular the people in charge of the digital aspects within them, currently have very few forums in which to discuss their practices in relation to the digital transition (thanks, incidentally, to the Mouvement Associatif and its regional delegations, which regularly address this issue), we felt it was essential to offer a space where they could feel less isolated on these issues.
Finally, the Resources section offers a selection of content aimed at voluntary organisations, so that they can familiarise themselves with ethical digital technology, but also at service providers, so that they can improve their knowledge of the voluntary sector and their methods of support. Our aim here is to list as much educational content as possible to promote the emancipation of the voluntary sector. If you have resources that we have not identified, please let us know (by sending a message to contact(at)emancipasso(dot)org) so that we can add them.
We will also continue to invite service providers to join the EmancipâAsso directory and to process applications. Itâs a long-term task to identify all the existing structures and ensure that they really offer services to associations that include a support dimension. Throughout the year, we will try to be present at the main gatherings of ethical and responsible digital professionals to inform them about the scheme and encourage them to join.
Thanks to your donations, Shane is not afraid to fight Toxicloud. â Illustration CC-By David Revoy
Finally, once the associations are aware of the project and have joined the EmancipâAsso community, we will put more energy into animating this community in order to facilitate exchanges between participants. Our goal is for the EmancipâAsso community to become an essential space for all associations in transition or that have completed their digital transition, and for frequent visits to this community to become an integral part of associative practices.
Thank you for supporting EmancipâAsso and Framasoft
So if you like this project and if itâs possible for you, we encourage you to support Framasoft. A part of your donations will help us to finance the costs (communication campaign and project coordination) of the EmancipâAsso project in 2024.
Once again this year, we need you, your support, your sharing to help us regain ground on the toxic GAFAM web and multiply the number of ethical digital spaces.
So weâve asked David Revoy to help us present this on our « Support Framasoft » page, which we invite you to visit (because itâs beautiful) and above all to share as widely as possible :
If we are to balance our budget for 2024, we have just 12 days left to raise ⏠109000: we canât do it without your help !
Mobile App, redesign, new dev, promotion… let’s build a bright future for PeerTube !
Developing an ethical and emancipating alternative to YouTube, Twitch or Vimeo without Surveillance Capitalism’s means is a huge undertaking. Especially for a small French not-for-profit that already manages several projects to promote digital commons.
đŠ VS đ: Let’s take back some ground from the tech giants!
We (Bonjour ! We are Framasoft !) have been developing PeerTube for six years. Two weeks after releasing the sixth version of the software, let’s take a step back on six years of work, examine the huge opportunity that the present times hold for PeerTube, and look towards what we plan to do next year to prepare for its success… if you give us the means to get there!
Click to support Framasoft and push back against the Yetube – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
Not a rival, just an alternative
The realization that led us to develop PeerTube is that no one can rival YouTube or Twitch. You would need Google’s money, Amazon servers’ farms… Above all, you would need the greed to exploit millions of creators and videomakers, groom them into formatting their content to your needs, and feed them the crumbs of the wealth you gain by farming their audience into data livestock.
Monopolistic centralized video platforms can only be sustained by surveillance capitalism.
We wanted small groups such as institutions, educators, communities, artists, citizens, etc. to be able to afford to emancipate themselves from Big Tech’s platforms, without getting lost in the world wide web. We needed to develop a tool to democratize videohosting, so it had to be designed with radically different values in mind.
And that is what we did. We build PeerTube to empower people, not databases or shareholders.
Today, PeerTube is:
a Free-Libre software (transparency, protection against monopoly)
you can host on your server (self-hosting, autonomy, empowerment)
to create your video and livestream platform, with your own rules (community building, self-management)
that lets you federate (or not!) to other PeerTube platforms through ActivityPub protocol (federation, network, outreach)
that adds (optional) peer-to-peer streaming to classic streaming so it can withstand affluence (resilience, sharing, decentralization)
where more powerful servers can help less fortunate ones with redundancy (solidarity, resilience)
that can store videos externally with S3 storage (adaptability, cost-efficiency)
that can deport CPU-hungry tasks such as video or live transcoding to a dedicated server (efficiency, resilience, sustainability)
So no: PeerTube is not, and will not be a rival to YouTube or Twitch. PeerTube is powered by other values that those coded into Google’s and Amazon’s ecosystems. PeerTube is an alternative, and that’s exactly why this is so exciting.
In the last six years, with more than 275 000 lines of code, we got:
From a POC to a fully operative federated video platform with p2p broadcasting, complete with subtitles, redundancy, video import, search tools and localization (PeerTube v1, oct. 2018)
Notifications, playlists, a plugin system, moderation tools, federation tools, a better video player, a presentation website and an instances index (PeerTube v2, nov. 2019)
Federated research tool (and a search engine https://sepiasearch.org), more moderation tools, lots of code improvement, UX revamping, and last but not least: p2p livestream (PeerTube v3, Jan. 2021)
Improved transcoding, channels and instances homepage customization, improved search, an even better video player, filtering videos on pages, advanced administration and moderation tools, new video management tool, and a big code cleaning session (PeerTube v4, Dec. 2021)
A video editing tool, improved video statistics and metrics display, replay feature for permanent livestreams, latency settings for lives, an improved video player (for mobile displays), a more powerful plugin system, more customization options, more video filtering options, a new and user friendly feedback tool and a renewed presentation website (PeerTube v5, Dec. 2022)
Account request moderation, « back to live » button, remote transcoding (to deport CPU hungry task on a dedicated server). storyboard (previews in the progress bar), video chapters, improved accessibility, upload a new version of a video, and password-protected videos. (PeerTube v6, Nov. 2023)
And that is just when you only consider the software development part of PeerTube. In order to support and promote this software, we had to build a whole ecosystem.
PeerTube is also an ecosystem
PeerTube, nowadays, is also a coding community. On the project forge (online space to contribute on developments), we’ve had more than 400 contributors, 4,300 issues (features and support requests) closed over 6 years and 500 still open, and 12,400 contributions integrated upstream.
As not anyone can familiarize themselves with more than 275 000 lines of code, an easy way to contribute to PeerTube is by developing plugins : there are hundreds of them! Among them, there are the live chat (to get a chat during livestreams), plugins to authenticate against external authentication platforms, annotations to add in the video player, a transcription plugin to automatically create subtitles for your videos or plugins to add monetization to PeerTube videos.
There are now more than a thousand PeerTube platforms all over the world (that we know of ^^), hosting almost a million videos. We have created an instances index that feeds content to SepiaSearch, our search engine for PeerTube videos, channels and playlists. We moderate it according to our terms and conditions, but anyone is free to use the code we develop to create their own index and search engine.
We promote PeerTube with an official website Joinpeertube.org, where the latest news are shared on the blog and the newsletter. There is also a mastodon account (and an -almost abandoned- account on Twitter). We also spend lots of hours talking to medias, researchers, innovators, communities, contributors, etc.
Fighting dragons with toothpicks
So, how can we estimate the cost of those 6 years of work? Should we just consider development time and the management of the development community (issues, code review, support)?
Should we also count the work done on blogposts, illustrations and promotion material, establishing roadmaps, working with designers, exchanging experience with researchers, videomakers, and amazing projects, some of which we have supported with funds? What about the time for moderating our search engine or cleaning after spammers on our feedback tool?
Even though we cannot pinpoint the exact budget Framasoft spent on PeerTube since 2017, our conservative estimate would be around 500 000 âŹ. Over six years. As we got two grants from the European commission (through the NGI0 Search & Discovery and Entrust programs) totaling 132 000 âŹ, it means that 73,6 % of PeerTube budget came from donations.
Now let’s overestimate the cost of PeerTube to 600 000 ⏠over 6 years, to make sure we have covered every expense.
Even then, PeerTube total cost would represent 22 millionth (0.0022 %) of YouTube’s ad revenues last year. Yes, we did the math.
We are – figuratively – fighting dragons with toothpicks. That’s why we think that PeerTube cannot and will not rival YouTube nor Twitch (and even less TikTok that presents a whole other experience).
But, as an alternative, PeerTube is already successful.
Click to support Sepia against the Videoraptor – illustration David Revoy – LicenceâŻ: CC-By 4.0
A success in our eyes
Today, we know of more than 1000 instances (servers on which PeerTube is installed and running), sharing almost a million videos.
As it is not limited by the captology mechanics of an ad-and-attention-based model, PeerTube offers features not available from tech giants:
compatibility with other social tools via ActivityPub (Imagine you could tweet a comment to a YouTube video: with Mastodon and PeerTube, you can.)
share a video from a start timecode to a stop timecode (YouTube has caught up with us, since)
untempered chronological access to your suscriptions feed (no need to « click the bell » in addition to subscribing)
password-protected videos (unavailable in YouTube, paid in Vimeo)
replace a video by an updated version
We intended to make PeerTube specifically for people that need (and want) to share their videos outside of the surveillance capitalism model. Obviously we all know (and like) some YouTubers and Twitch-streamers, but they are the visible part of the iceberg of online video sharing.
Institutions, Educators, Independent medias, Citizens, and even creators should have the freedom to share videos online without contributing to a company’s monopoly, having to accept forced advertisement, or sacrificing on their audience’s data and privacy. The great news is, some of them have already found such freedom, and it makes us proud :
Skeptikon (French collective, videos about critical thinking and scepticism)
TILvids (Til = Today I Learned, edutainment videos in English, with authorized and official YouTube mirroring)
Bunseed (French initiative, FOSS-based alternative to Patreon, by and for creators, built upon PeerTube)
We want to build on the recognition PeerTube is getting, that’s why we have planned a lot of work for 2024!
PeerTube’s roadmap for v7, in 2024
The features we have planned for the next year of development on PeerTube all have the same goal: facilite adoption by improving ease-of-use in several ways. As for version 6, most of those features has been chosen from the ideas you shared and voted for on our feedback tool.
We plan to:
Add a data export/import system (with or without video files), so users can easily change their instance.
Get a full accessibility audit, to facilitate use for people with specific needs, and complete the work done this year (see version 6 release). If we have time left on integrating the report’s recommandations, we will see if and how we could add speech-to-text transcription
Add a comment moderation tool usable for both instance administrators and video uploaders.
Create a new moderation tool to sort content according to preset keywords lists ( « far-right dogwhistling words in German », « queerphobic idioms in English », etc). This tool will present corresponding content to instance administrators and moderators, that will then determine if it fits their moderation policy.
(Technical) separation of audio and video streams. Such improvement will unlock the possibility, in the future, to develop and get multi-audio track videos (e.g. multiple langages), or multi-videos track with the same audio stream (e.g. multiple angles)
Add a new « audio-only » resolution (in the « 720p », « 1080p », etc. menu) for our HLS player. It will enable users to only get the audio track streamed to them, improving sustainability when they only want to listen to a video and look at other tabs.
Rethink the sensitive content characterization. At the moment, you can only tag videos as « Safe For Work » / « Not Safe For Work ». But « sensitive content » can imply lots of cases: violence, nudity, strong langage, etc. We will work with designers to think about the appropriate way to characterize and treat such cases.
Revamp the video management space. We have added lots of new features along the years (live and replay, studio editor, etc.)… it’s great, but tabs and menus accumulated. We will work with designers to rethink it from the ground up and make it easy-to-use.
Get a complete review and implement a redesign of the experience and interface of PeerTube. Even though we’ve had lots of help along the way, PeerTube has not benefited of guidance in design from the get-go. We want to think this work as a reboot, where everything (even the orange?) is on the table, if it helps with adoption and ease of use.
Hep us push back against the Videoraptor- Illustration CC-By David Revoy
Doubling the dev team for resilience…
OK, when you go from one to two developers, « doubling » is easier… but it was still a big deal to us.
First, because Framasoft is a not-for-profit funded mainly by donations. So far, we’ve had the honor and privilege to get enough support to fund our expenses, the main being our 10 employees. But donation-based economics models are, by definition, highly unpredictable. That is especially true in an economy where inflation, energy costs, etc. make most of our supporters rethink their budget.
Another reason lies within our core values: we believe in decentralization and networks of small actors (over growing into giants and monopolies). We also believe that prioritizing humans and care implies to stay in a small team configuration, where we truly know each other.
And we think that the way we have applied those values into our not-for-profit is key to the efficiency, the creativity and the talents expressed by our members (both volunteers and employees). That’s why we have worked on limiting Framasoft’s growth, and have set the symbolic limit of « ten employees tops ».
During 2022 and 2023, there were lots of discussions on this topic within Framasoft. On one hand, we can’t keep on developing PeerTube with only one developer (even though someone as talented as Chocobozzz), who could win the lottery, leave, or just change careers. On the other hand, if we hired a new developer, what would be their profile? How can we make sure they would fit in? Can we secure a long lasting job for them?
In late 2022, Chocobozzz asked us to post an internship offer. It was both to test if, after 5 years coding solo on PeerTube, teamwork came back easily (it did) ; but also to train someone on PeerTube’s code core, see how it can be apprehended by newcomers, and how to improve its documentation.
Wicklow joined us for an internship between February and August 2023, and produced the « password protected video features » released in version 6 of PeerTube. We hadn’t plan to hire him: we had, then, other profiles in mind, and thought we wouldn’t be able to start a hiring process before 2024. We specifically told him so, as not to give him false hope… But as we benefited from a grant extension from NGI0 program, we also realized that he was a perfect fit in the project, for the team and in our not-for-profit.
Long story short: we hired Wicklow in September 2023, just as he graduated, on a one-year contract (that we hope to secure with your help!).
…and to create an iOS/Android mobile app!
This new hire has two goals. First and foremost, we want another developer to become familiar with PeerTube’s core code, and lessen the « bus factor« . Wicklow should also become gradually able to help Chocobozzz in managing the code community.
As the community grows (and we are very thankful), so does the managing workload: answering to issues and support requests on our forum, reviewing code contributions, etc. Even though being present for the community is important, it’s taking up to half of Chocobozzz’s time, and that means even less time to develop new features.
The second and main goal for Wicklow in 2024 would be, with the help of designers, to create and publish an official PeerTube mobile app. Mobile viewing has become the main way to watch videos. Even though there are already mobile apps that can play videos on PeerTube, we feel that an official app could help with PeerTube’s adoption and attractiveness.
For 2024, the app would be limited to finding and watching videos. We want users to be able to use a federated search engine, watch videos and livestreams, log in to their account on their PeerTube instance, access their notifications, subscriptions, playlists, etc. If successful, this first version of the app could be extended to other use-cases and features in the future.
Our plan is to publish this app both on iOS (pending Apple’s review, that can be tricky) and Android… and, as an extended goal (so « if all goes well »), on Android TV as well.
Sepia, PeerTube’s mascot, strong from your support – illustration David Revoy – LicenceâŻ: CC-By 4.0
Promoting the PeerTube Ecosystem
PeerTube is more than code, and we want to shed a light on the incredible community that is thriving around this project.
We often see amazing plugins, interesting instances and channels, new initiatives and experiments… that we would like to share. But we seldom have and take time to do so.
In the meantime, we also witness many people wondering if PeerTube allows livestream (it does!) if there is a chat for lives (yes: it’s a great plugin!), or if there are websites to find content on PeerTube (yes again!)
To kick off this work, we will go live and answer all your questions about PeerTube during a livestream hosted by Laurens from the Fediverse Report blog and newsletter, on our Peer.Tube channel! You can already go on Mastodon and ask your questions with the #PeerTubeAMA hashtag.
This AMA (« Ask Me Anything ») will take place tomorrow, Dec 13th, from 6 to 8pm (CET), on this link.
As we stated sooner in this (long) blogpost, we were fortunate enough to get grants from the European Commission program NGI, through the NLnet foundation (many thanks to them!). The previous grants helped us fund a quarter of our six years of work on PeerTube. We are glad to announce that we got another grant for 2024, that will cover planned development costs.
It means that, as it was for 75 % of the work until now, funding the rest of our plans relies on donations. Communicating about PeerTube and its ecosystem, sharing experience with diverse actors, design costs, community support and management, etc. All those costs will be, as usual, funded by… some of you!
Our current donation campaign will determine Framasoft budget for 2024, and from its success we will know if we can secure a stable job for our second developer, while keep on all the other projects and actions that we take on.
Once again this year we need you, your support, your sharing, to help us regain ground on the toxic GAFAM web and multiply ethical digital spaces.
So we’ve asked David Revoy to help us present this on our « Support Framasoft » page, which we invite you to visit (because it’s beautiful) and above all to share as widely as possible:
If we are to balance our budget for 2024, we have three weeks to raise âŹ138,659 : we canât do it without your help !
5 years after its announcement, Mobilizon, our free, federated alternative to Facebook groups and events, is reaching maturity. We take this opportunity to look back on its history and future.
đŠ VS đ: Let’s take back some ground from the tech giants!
As this is the last major version of Mobilizon to be ported by Framasoft (yes, we’re teasing you a bit đ ), we’d like to start with a reminder of the various stages that led us to this v4.
2018: an intention and attentions
Remember: in December 2018 (5 years ago already!), we announced (in French) our intention to develop Mobilizon. Our aim was to offer an alternative to Facebook groups and events, which had become the de facto dominant tool as a platform for mobilisation, whether it was organising a birthday party, a free software conference or a climate protest.
To do this, we decided to do things in the right order, starting by asking different audiences about their real needs and expectations (not those we assumed). The aim was to create a tool that was not only practical and welcoming, but also empowering. For example, we decided to reject any form of social gamification (in Mobilizon you follow groups rather than individuals, we banned infinite scrolling in favour of simple pagination, etc.).
Click to support us and push back Face GhoĂ»l – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
2019: Crowdfunding and first beta version
In May 2019, we launched an appeal for donations to fund the development of a first version. Thanks to the mobilisation and generosity of over 1,000 donors, it was a success, with almost âŹ60,000 raised. Less than 6 months later, we announced a beta version of the software.
This version provided a good foundation for creating and publishing events. However, it still lacked « core » functionalities, such as the ability to register anonymously for an event, or federation (i.e. the ability of a Mobilizon instance (in French) to easily exchange data with other Mobilizon instances, or even Mastodon instances).
This v1 already offered what was to become the core of the software: groups (the central element of Mobilizon), articles, resources linked to a group, the possibility of having several profiles for the same account, the possibility of participating in an event without registering, and… the federation.
Click to support us and help Rose, the Mobilizon mascot – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
2021: notifications and an app
At the end of 2021, we announced version 2 of Mobilizon. One of the main new features was the eagerly awaited integration of a notification system. But also on the menu: time zone management, « RTL » management (for languages written from right to left, such as Arabic or Hebrew), provision of RSS feeds, the addition of sorting filters, the ability to define an event as « online » (without geographical location), public group tracking, etc. There was even the release of a smartphone application developed by Tom79 (thanks again to him!).
Its main focus was search. It introduced the possibility of federated searches: a search from the « SOMETHING » instance could return results from events hosted on the Mobilizon « ELSE » instance. As with PeerTube’s SepiaSearch metasearch engine, we designed and implemented a Mobilizon-specific engine that allows searches across multiple instances: https://search.joinmobilizon.org
With this release, we have also redesigned the front page of the software. Our aim is to give you more opportunities to discover events and groups you may not have known existed, and to make the diversity of content published on Mobilizon more visible.
During 2023 we also quietly released two minor versions. These added anti-spam tools, the ability to manage arbitrary addresses (because an address database can never be perfectly up to date), the ability to use external authentication systems, and the ability to define an external website for people who want to manage registrations outside Mobilizon.
They were also the occasion for bug hunting and improvements to the Mobilizon API, paving the way for one of the most eagerly awaited features of v4 (yes, the teasing is unsustainable đ ).
We’ve done it! Version 4 is finally here đ And we’re very proud of the new features it brings!
Private Announcements and Conversations
Event organisers can now send private announcements to attendees. This has been a long awaited feature!
Group or event administrators or moderators can now contact people registered in a group or event directly. You can then write to all these people, or select sub-groups, for example only those who have confirmed their attendance, or conversely those who have not confirmed (or declined). It’s even possible to contact people who have registered without creating a Mobilizon account. This opens up some very interesting possibilities, such as the possibility of communicating important information: a change of location or date, for example.
Please note that this is an announcement system and registrants cannot reply (although moderators can add messages). This is not a forum, but a channel for sharing important information in a more top-down way.
As well as this announcement mechanism, we’ve added a conversation system.
This allows you to contact a group or specific people and chat with them live.
For example, an outsider to an event can contact the group administrator from the event page and exchange messages with them. Think of this conversation system as the « DM » (direct message) or « MP » (private message) system you know from other social platforms.
Import and synchronise events from other platforms (Facebook, Meetup, etc.)
Once again, this was one of the most eagerly awaited features of Mobilizon.
But it was also one of the most complicated for us to implement in the software. Because these external platforms (yes, Facebook, we’re looking at you!) are the despots of kingdoms of which you are merely the vassal. If they want to raise the drawbridge over which your data passes, they can do so with the snap of a finger, and there is nothing you or we can do about it.
That’s why we’re announcing this feature as present, BUT with a great deal of reserve and caution.
Nevertheless, we’re excited to introduce this new Mobilizon feature to you!
How does it work?
First of all, please understand that everything that follows takes place… outside of Mobilizon. In an external tool modestly called « Mobilizon Import System » (note that we’ve kept it simple đ ).
From this tool, you’ll be able to connect to your Mobilizon account and define your profiles or groups on which you authorise external platforms (such as Meetup or EventBrite) to post. These profiles and groups then become « Destinations ».
Then, simply go to the page of the event you want to synchronise (e.g. https://www.eventbrite.fr/e/billets-street-art-feminisme-743545834607), copy and paste this address into Mobilizon’s import system, and the event will be imported.
In addition to the classic import, it is also possible (depending on the platform) to set up the synchronisation of one or more events. Once synchronised, the new events will be published on your selected Mobilizon profile/group. Event updates on the source (for example, if you change the description on Meetup) will automatically update the event republished on Mobilizon (note that deletions are not currently handled).
Important note: iCal (.ics) event feeds are supported! This means you can have events in Framagenda (or Google Calendar, we won’t judge you (too much)) and synchronise them in Mobilizon! Nice, isn’t it?
In addition to the iCal format, the platforms currently supported are Eventbrite, Meetup…
We did all the work on our end and… it works (Yaaaaaaaaay! đ„ł)… but only with our « App Developer » account (Oooooooohhh! đŠ).
We still have to go through several validation steps, and… we have absolutely no hand in it. It’s Facebook’s kingdom, so Facebook decides. Maybe it’ll work for 5 years, 5 months, 5 days. Maybe it won’t work at all. đ€·
Technically, another feature – reserved for developers – that we’ve added is the ability to add « webhooks« , which are internal calls that can also act as « destinations » for sources. Events can then be sent to these webhooks, which will do… well, whatever you want them to do! This might be useful for our friends at Transiscope, for example, so that their tool can also import events from other platforms.
Don’t go away! We’ve got more great features to share with you!
First of all, we’ve improved compatibility for tracking other federated event instances (one of the most interesting projects is « Event Federation for WordPress« , which would eventually allow the famous WordPress website/blog engine to be used as an event platform. We talked to the people coordinating this project to share our experiences and incorporated their requests in the form of developments in Mobilizon (which they confirmed in their latest blog post).
Secondly, we have improved the formatting of event descriptions when exporting events and in ICS feeds (which now take into account the status « tentative », « confirmed » or « cancelled »).
Also, we changed email registration confirmations for attendees without an account to now include an unsubscribe link.
Finally, Mobilizon is now available on more operating systems and architectures (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, arm64, etc.).
Mission accomplished, Framasoft is ready to pass the baton!
We still strongly believe in the future of this project.
But we’ve reached our goal: we announced an intention and a vision in 2018 and… we’ve fulfilled our mission!
Of course, software is far from bug-free. But anyone involved in software development knows that there will always be things to fix, features to add… It’s never-ending. And we sincerely believe that it’s also important to be able to step back, say to yourself that you’ve kept your commitment, and hand over a project.
The Framasoft team is small: Mobilizon is a salaried developer (yes, only one!), and not even full-time… He is certainly supported by the rest of the association in terms of communication, project management, fundraising, etc. But after five years, we consider the project a success. But after 5 years, we feel that Mobilizon is stable enough for him to redirect his energy and skills to other projects and missions.
We’re not putting Mobilizon on the shelf!
First of all, Framasoft is committed to maintain this v4 for the next few months (and as long as we can), especially in case of security updates or blocking bugs. We’ll also maintain our public, French-language forum https://mobilizon.fr.
But we won’t be developing any new features.
Secondly, another team (the Kaihuri association, well known to the Mobilizon community as the maintainers of the Keskonfai instance) already has a take-over and contribution project to improve Mobilizon’s handling. They present their project and their ambitions on our forum dedicated to Mobilizon: don’t hesitate to give them your feedback and encouragement (or disagreement, for that matter), but also your desire and ability to contribute.
So, if the community doesn’t mind, in the next few weeks we’ll be handing over all the Mobilizon « keys » to this community (they already have maintainer access to the source code repository, but this also applies to the joinmobilizon.org, mobilizon.org, search.joinmobilizon.org websites, tools, social media accounts, etc.).
Mobilizon seems to have a bright future ahead!
For five years, thanks to your donations, Rose has been training to fight Faceghoul – Illustration by David Revoy – LicenceâŻ: CC-By 4.0
Five years of Mobilizon, thanks to you (and your donations)!
Although we’ll be handing over the keys to the project in a few weeks time, all the work done throughout 2023 has come at a significant cost.
If you like this version 4, and it’s possible for you to do so, we encourage you to support Framasoft as a token of our gratitude for all the work we’ve done this year, but also for honouring our original moral contract: to provide you with a free, federated alternative to Facebook groups and events.
Once again this year we need you, your support, your sharing, to help us regain ground on the toxic GAFAM web and multiply ethical digital spaces.
So we’ve asked David Revoy to help us present this on our « Support Framasoft » page, which we invite you to visit (because it’s beautiful) and above all to share as widely as possible:
If we are to balance our budget for 2024, we have five weeks to raise âŹ162,716 : we canât do it without your help !
It’s #givingtuesday, so we’re giving you PeerTube v6 today! PeerTube is the software we develop for creators, media, institutions, educators… to manage their own video platform, as an alternative to YouTube and Twitch.
đŠ VS đ: Let’s take back some ground from the tech giants!
The sixth major version is being released today and we are very proud! It is the most ambitious one since we added peer-to-peer livestreaming. There is a good reason for that: we packed this v6 with features inspired by your ideas!
We are so eager to present all the work we achieved that we’ll get right into it. But stay tuned: in two weeks, we’ll take more time to talk about PeerTube’s history, the state of this project and the great plans we have for its future!
Click to support us and help push back Videoraptor â Illustration CC-By David Revoy
This year: two minor updates and a major achievement
In 2023, and before preparing this major update, we released only two minor versions… but one of them brought to the table a major technical feature that will help democratize video hosting even more.
an « asking for an account » feature, where instance moderators can manage and moderate news account requests;
a back-to-live button, so in case you lag behind during a livestream, you can go back to the direct
Improvements on the authentication plugin, to facilitate signing on with external credentials
June 2023: PeerTube 5.2…
As you’ll find out in our 5.2 release blogpost, there were some smaller but important new features such as:
Adapting RSS feeds to podcast standards, so any podcast client could be able to read a PeerTube channel, for example
The option to set the privacy of a livestream replay, that way streamers can choose beforehand if the replay of their live will be Public, Unlisted, Private or Internal
Improved mouse-free navigation: for those who prefer or need to navigate using their keyboard
And upgrades in our documentation (it’s quite thorough: check it out!)
…with a major feature: Remote Transcoding
But the game changer in this 5.2 release was the new remote transcoding feature.
When a creator uploads a video (or when they are streaming live), PeerTube needs to transform their video file into an efficient format. This task is called video transcoding, and it consumes lots of CPU power. PeerTube admins used to need (costly) big-CPU servers for a task that wasn’t permanent… until remote transcoding.
Remote transcoding allows PeerTube admins to deport some or all of their transcoding tasks to another, more powerful server, one that can be shared with other admins, for example.
It makes the whole PeerTube administration cheaper, more resilient, more power-efficient… and opens a way of sharing resources between communities!
We want, once again to thank the NGI Entrust program and the NLnet foundation for the grant that helped us achieve such a technical improvement!
Click to support us and help Sepia reach their potential â Illustration CC-By David Revoy
PeerTube v6 is Based⊠(on your ideas)
Enough with the past, let’s detail the features of this new major version. Note that, for this whole 2023 roadmap, we developed features suggested and upvoted by… you! Or at least by those of you who shared your ideas on our feedback website.
Protect your videos with passwords!
That was a very awaited feature. Password-protected videos can be used in lots of situations: to create exclusive content, mark a step in an educational plan, share videos with people trusted by the ones you trust…
On their PeerTube account, creators can now set a single password when they upload, import or update the settings of their videos.
But with our REST API, admins and developers can take it a step further. They can set and store as many passwords as they want, thus easily give and revoke access to videos.
This feature was the work of Wicklow, during his internship with us.
Video storyboard: preview what’s coming!
If you like to peruse your videos online, you might be used to hover the progress bar with your mouse or finger. Usually, a preview of the frame appears as a thumbnail: that’s called a storyboard feature, and that’s now available in PeerTube!
Please note that as Storyboards are only generated when uploading (or importing) a video, they will only be available for new videos of instances that upgraded to v6…
Or you can ask, very kindly, to your admin(s) that they use the magical npm run create-generate-storyboard-job command (warning: this task might need some CPU power), and generate storyboards for older videos.
Upload a new version of your video!
Sometimes, video creators want to update a video, to correct a mistake, offer new information… or just to propose a better cut of their work!
Now, with PeerTube, they can upload and replace an older version of their video. Though the older video file will be permanently erased (no backsies !), creators will keep the same URL, title and infos, comments, stats, etc.
Obviously, such a feature requires trust between videomakers and admins, who don’t want to be responsible for a cute kitten video being « updated » into an awful advertisement for cat-hating groups.
That’s why such a feature will only be available if admins choose to enable it on their PeerTube platforms, and will display a « Video re-upload » tag on updated videos.
Get chapters in your videos!
Creators can now add chapters to their videos on PeerTube. In a video settings page, they’ll get a new « chapters » tab where they’ll only need to specify the timecode and title of each chapter for PeerTube to add it.
If they import their video from another platform (cough YouTube cough), PeerTube should automatically recognize and import chapters set on this distant video.
When chapters are set, markers will appear and segment the progress bar. Chapter titles will be displayed when you hover or touch one of those chapters segments.
Stress tests, performance and config recommandations
Last year, thanks to French indie journalist David Dufresne’s Au Poste! livestream show and his hoster Octopuce, we got a livestream stress test with more than 400 simultaneous viewers: see the report here on Octopuce’s blog[FR].
Such tests are really helpful to understand where we can improve PeerTube to reduce bottlenecks, improve performance, and give advice on the best configuration for a PeerTube server if an admin plans on getting a lot of traffic.
That’s why this year, we have decided to realize more tests, with a thousand simultaneous users simulated both in livestream and classic video streaming conditions. Lots of thanks and datalove to Octopuce for helping us deploy our test infrastructure.
We will soon publish a report with our conclusions and recommended server configurations depending on usecases (late 2023, early 2024). In the meantime, early tests motivated us to add many performances improvements into this v6, such as (brace yourselves for the technical terms):
Process unicast HTTP job in worker threads
Sign ActivityPub requests in worker threads
Optimize recommended videos HTTP request
Optimize videos SQL queries when filtering on lives or tags
Optimize /videos/{id}/views endpoint with many viewers
Add ability to disable PeerTube HTTP logs
…and there’s always more!
A new major version always comes with its lot of changes, improvements, bugfixes, etc. You can read the complete log here, but here are the highlights:
We needed to settle a technical debt: v6 removes support for WebTorrent to focus on HLS (with WebRTC P2P). Both are technical bricks used to get peer-to-peer streaming in web browsers, but HLS is more fitted to what we are doing (and plan to do) with PeerTube
The video player is more efficient
It is not being rebuilt anymore every time the video changes
It keeps your watching settings (speed, fullscreen, etc.) when the video changes
It automatically adjust its size to match the video ratio
We have improved SEO, to help videos hosted on a PeerTube platform appear higher in the search results of search engines
We worked a lot on improving PeerTube’s accessibility on many levels, to streamline the experience of people with disabilities.
Click to support us and help push Yetube back – CC-By Illustration David Revoy
What about PeerTube’s future?
With YouTube waging war against adblockers, Twitch increasingly exploiting streamers, and everyone becoming more and more aware of the toxicity of this system… PeerTube is getting traction, recognition and a growing community.
We have so many announcements to make about the future we plan for PeerTube, that we will publish a separate news, in two weeks. We are also planning on hosting an « Ask Us Anything » livestream, to answer the questions you’d have about PeerTube.
Click to support us and help Sepia push back Videoraptor – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
Thank you for supporting PeerTube and Framasoft
In the meantime, we want to remind you that all these developments were achieved by only one full-time payed developer, an intern, and a fabulous community (lots of datalove to Chocobozzz, Wicklow, and the many, many contributors: y’all are amazing!)
Framasoft being a French not-for-profit mainly funded by grassroots donations (75% of our yearly income comes from people like you and us), PeerTube development has been funded by two main sources:
French-speaking FOSS enthusiasts
Grants from the NGI initiative, through NLnet (in 2021 & 2023)
If you are a non-French-speaking PeerTube aficionado, please consider supporting our work by making a donation to Framasoft. It will greatly help us fund our many, many projects, and balance our 2024 budget.
Once again this year we need you, your support, your sharing to help us regain ground on the toxic GAFAM web and multiply the number of ethical digital spaces. So we’ve asked David Revoy to help us present this on our support Framasoft page, which we invite you to visit (because it’s beautiful) and above all to share as widely as possible:
If we are to balance our budget for 2024, we have five weeks to raise âŹ176,425: we can’t do it without your help!
Thanks again for supporting PeerTube,
Framasoft’s team.
700 organisations already up in the (free) clouds : Framaspace’s first year in review
The aim of this long article is to take stock of the Framaspace project (an associative cloud based on Nextcloud) a little over a year after its announcement.
đŠ VS đ: Let’s take back some ground from the tech giants!
For those of you who weren’t there, or who don’t remember, the desire to set up Frama.space was based on three things.
The first is that things are fucked. Politically, socially, geopolitically, ecologically and so on. Of course, you may think otherwise, but we don’t think the world is going very well…
The second observation is that civil society, caricatured here as associations and trade unions, is under attack from all sides. The pressure to depoliticise associations, the reduction of their funding in favour of « impact companies » or the start-up nation, the attacks on freedom of association… All this is eroding the capacity of the voluntary sector to respond to needs that the market cannot meet. It is becoming increasingly difficult to balance a social contract that is being undermined by both business and government.
Finally, closer to Framasoft, digital technology has become a tool for organising people, but also for taking action. However, this rather positive observation is countered by two more negative observations. Firstly, digital technology is a tool for surveillance and alienation. And secondly, associations are lagging behind both in terms of use and consistency (The report in the link is in French, sorry!). Associations working for an ecological transition, for example, will use the tools and services of GAFAM, which play a large part in the problem they are trying to solve.
Frama.space: (Next)cloud for non-profit organisations
A year ago we announced a new Framasoft service: Frama.space.
We believe that these associations and collectives need (and even want) to rediscover the coherence between their values, their actions and their tools. It seems contradictory to us, for example, to be an association committed to « zero waste » and still use Google or Microsoft tools.
Please note that this is not a value judgement on our part. We fully understand that there may be contradictions and legitimate objections (it is perfectly possible to be concerned about the fate of the planet and still drive your children to a weekly sports activity 20km away).
However, we believe it is important that these structures have the choice to have easy access to tools that are not based on the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism.
Framaspace interface (« Files » application)
Nextcloud: an imperfect solution (but a solution nonetheless)
Framaspace includes the collaborative online office suites Collabora Online and OnlyOffice. Here is a screenshot of a spreadsheet being edited directly in the browser.
The software has a lot of room for improvement (in terms of UX, technical debt, performance, etc.), but… it’s still the best horse in the stable.
What’s more, its community is large (over 60 million users worldwide) and quite active, which gives us hope for the future.
We have therefore decided to base our Framaspace offering on this software, proposing a technically ambitious offering capable of eventually hosting up to 10,000 Framaspace spaces (and therefore as many instances of the Nextcloud software). To achieve this, we have built a substantial technical infrastructure (the video link is in French, sorry!) and developed homemade software tools (free of charge, of course) to validate registration requests and automatically provision new spaces very quickly, with just a few clicks.
Commented interface for CHARON, the software developed by Framasoft that allows us to manage Framaspace applications. (Commentary in French, but if you want more information on this point, ask us in the comments section bellow!)
But enough of reminiscing: if you want to know more about the ambitions behind Framaspace, you can watch two videos:
First of all, we already had to change the name because the .space extension increased the likelihood that emails containing frama.space addresses would be considered spam. This was obviously the fault of the email giants (article in French, sorry!), but we couldn’t accept a solution that would interfere with the normal use of the platform. So we decided to use a domain name with a more traditional but longer extension: framaspace.org.The transition is underway and will take place in stages as there is no rush.We also announced that we have four objectives:
Facilitate access to Nextcloud/Framaspace
Raise awareness of Nextcloud/Framaspace
Contribute to the creation of a French-speaking Nextcloud/Framaspace community
Use Nextcloud/Framaspace as an empowerment tool
This first anniversary is therefore a good time to take stock of each of these objectives.
Functional assessment: does it work or not?
Yes, it does!
While you are reading these lines, more than 700 spaces are active. This means that Framasoft provides tools to 700 associations and groups. And the feedback is very positive!
We have been able to carry out complex operations without too much difficulty. For example, we’ve carried out major upgrades of Nextcloud (from version 25 to version 26) with very limited downtime (less than 2 minutes per space).
As far as the technical infrastructure is concerned, there are occasional potholes, but the infrastructure is holding up!
For example, at the end of 2022 we noticed that there was a problem with our office suite management system. With the year-end holidays just around the corner, followed by intense preparations for the Framasoft AGM, we decided to suspend registration and take the time needed to develop a long-term solution. We reopened the registration in March 2023. So, in case you missed the news: it’s perfectly possible to register your association or collective on https://framaspace.org!
The fact that it’s Framasoft that manages the technical aspects can have certain disadvantages (we limit the number of accounts, disk space or Nextcloud plugins you can use). However, this outsourcing makes life much easier for the users (who, in most cases, would find it very difficult to maintain over time an instance of Nextcloud software that they would have installed ‘manually’).
In one year, we have gone from 0 to more than 700 spaces managed by Framasoft. We therefore consider this functional assessment to be more than satisfactory.
Click to support us and push Demon Drive away – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
Public awareness
One of Framaspace’s objectives is also to raise awareness of Nextcloud and the Framaspace offer (or similar offers elsewhere, in particular at CHATONS).
This part of the project got off to a rather slow start, but that’s quite logical, because for various reasons we were not able to devote as much time to this part of the project in 2023 as we would have liked.
Empowerment assessment
This part of the project is planned for 2025. There were no plans to work on it in 2023. So it’s logical that we haven’t made any progress on it.
The 5 key points of this « empowerment » slide: Disseminating information / Working together to identify needs / Transforming uses / Federation / Pooling funding for certain functionalities
Project stats
Here are some numbers to give you a more objective view of the first year. If you’re not interested, you can skip to the « Review of the review » section đ
Typology of the structures
Breakdown by type of structure
Breakdown of spaces by type of structure (Colours explained below)
Description :
72% associations under the law of 1901(yellow);
22% informal groups (pink);
5% trade unions (green);
1% associations under the 1907 law (mixed/cultural associations) (blue).
Breakdown by activity
Description (note: organisations could choose more than one topic):
A first « block » of more than 250 organisations in the following sectors or themes Education/training, environment, culture, social affairs;
a final « block » of less than 100 organisations claiming to be active in the following sectors or themes: Sport, Health, Research, Justice, Spiritual or philosophical activities, Tourism.
Breakdown by year in which the structure was created
Description: 50% of the 700 spaces correspond to structures created in 2017 or later. Even if a dozen structures existed before 1950, we can deduce that the Framaspace public as a whole represents rather recent structures.
Breakdown by number of persons employed
Description and comments: 500 of the spaces (71% of the total) are structures with no employees. There are a few structures with more than 20 employees, but these are often « anomalies » (for example, the space is created for a local trade union group, which indicates the number of employees of the national trade union).
Breakdown by number of members
Description: Half of the spaces represent organisations with less than 30 members. 75% say they have 100 members or less.
Breakdown by number of beneficiaries
Description: Half of the spaces represent organisations claiming to reach 100 people or more. There are a few organisations claiming to reach more than 25,000 people, but these are often « anomalies » (for example, the space is created for a local trade union group, which indicates the number of beneficiaries of the national trade union).
Breakdown by annual budget
Description: 150 organisations did not wish to answer this question. Of the remaining 550 organisations, half said they had an annual budget of less than âŹ4,000 (around a hundred organisations even said they had a budget of âŹ0). About 25% of the organisations reported having a budget between âŹ4,000 and âŹ50,000 (which can be correlated with organisations having at least oneâ e employeeâ e). A handful of organisations report a budget of more than âŹ50,000/year, but again these are mostly ‘statistical anomalies’.
Examples of structures
NB: These associations have presented themselves publicly on the Framaspace forum, so we have no problem with their identity or purpose being made public.
For example:
« Hello. We’re the « Les petits pois sont verts » association in Clamart. Our aim is to imagine and build a way of life based on solidarity and respect for the environment by ..:
Bringing together people in Clamart who share the same motivations,
encouraging local dynamism
supporting projects,
gathering and disseminating information.
We are only a few years old and we advocate the use of free and sober digital technology.
We use the following Framasoft tools Framapad, Framadate and recently Frama.space. »
Or again:
« The Association des Cavaliers Au Long Cours (CALC) is a French-speaking association with about 200 members from all over the world (our most distant member is in Kyrgyzstan!), but mainly from Western European countries. Our aim is to develop long-distance travel with a mounted and/or covered animal (horse, donkey, mule, etc.). We also help would-be travellers with their organisation and provide assistance to travellers in difficulty ».
Other examples:
Plan B – Breton Pop Education Association (Rennes)
AMAP of St Vallier de Thiey (Alpes Maritimes)
La Gonette – local currency for citizens (Lyon)
Les amis du Portique – Journal of Philosophy and Human Sciences
Les Pieds Ă Terre – environmental education (Haute-Loire)
Family planning in the Aude
…
Use of structures
Office suites used
Distribution of Framaspaces between Collabora Online and OnlyOffice
NB: The overrepresentation of Collabora Online is due to the fact that it is the office suite offered by default. The administrator of the instance can switch to OnlyOffice if they wish, but very few do.
Usage stats
Number of active
Active: 700
Rejected: 14
Deactivated (by their administrators) 10
Accounts (admins + users): 3,356
Average: 4.8 accounts; Median: 2 accounts
Hosted user files: 760,939 for 860 GB (excluding revisions and recycle bin)
131 GB in recycle bin
99% of spaces have created at least one file
Connections:
198 rooms connected in the last 3 days
390 rooms connected in the last 15 days
Number of accounts
Description: almost 300 rooms have only one account (necessarily the « admin » account). This means that 40% of the spaces have no collaborative use with other users. However, we did find cases where the space admin did have collaborative uses with other people in his or her association (for example, by using shared folders, with or without passwords). This means – all the same – that 60% of the spaces have several users. 42% even have 5 or more users.
Used disk space
Description: almost all spaces have used their file space (only 2% have never created a file). It is interesting to note that less than 20% of the spaces use more than 1 GB (out of a maximum of 40 GB per space).
Number of files
Description: 50% of the rooms have more than 250 user files. This is a good « surprise » in our opinion: it means that Framaspace is quite useful (either for storing or sharing files).
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Balance sheet
Expenses
At present, the technical infrastructure (computer servers) of Framaspace costs us about 1,200 ⏠per month (i.e. about 15,000 ⏠per year). The cost of the work, estimated by the very inaccurate LaLouche Institute, is around âŹ20,000 of investment before the launch of the project. Since the start of the project, we’ve been able to estimate this figure at around âŹ2,000 per month (3 people involved, working very, very part-time on this project). So, roughly speaking, Framaspace has cost Framasoft around âŹ60,000.
Income
The income side is a bit more complex.
Framaspace is a project reserved for small associations and solidarity groups, and it is deliberately free. We don’t want the price to be a barrier to access. And we don’t want to set a « free price », because a price means a service sold, a service provided, an invoice and obligations (contractual, accounting and fiscal). We voluntarily choose to donate without expecting any financial compensation (which does not mean that we cannot hope for it đ ).
It is likely that some members of the associations we host have made a donation to Framasoft. However, we do not want to earmark donations for Framasoft projects. For accounting purposes, a donation earmarked for a project must go into a dedicated fund that must be used for that project. However, we would like donations to Framasoft to be able to finance « loss-making » projects, which is exactly what Framaspace is doing in this first year.
For the sake of simplicity we can say that the income is… âŹ0!đ±
Cost per space
From the above data, we can deduce that the cost of a space (so far) is âŹ86 per year (or âŹ7 per month, of which âŹ1.8 per month is infrastructure costs).
However, the infrastructure costs are not expected to change too much and the labour costs are expected to increase slightly by 2024, while the number of spaces could triple or quadruple. Let us assume a total cost of âŹ60,000 (for 2023) + âŹ15,000 for the servers in 2024 + âŹ36,000 in labour costs. This gives a total of âŹ111,000 by the end of 2024. Assuming 2,500 active spaces at the end of 2024, the total cost would be âŹ45 per space per year (i.e. âŹ3.7 per month, including âŹ1/month for infrastructure costs). These costs could fall further in 2025.
It’s a significant cost, and few associations can afford this type of project, which does not aim to be profitable or even break even.
However, we believe that the political importance of this project means that we have to take this risk. We hope (more from experience than naivety) that the associations that can afford it will support Framasoft (and indirectly Framaspace) financially.
Review of the review
The news is pretty good!
Framaspace meme using biologist Richard Dawkins’ famous line about science, « It works, Bitches ». (context; PeerTube video)
First of all, Framaspace works đ
Managing 700 Nextcloud instances in one year isn’t bad, is it? Especially since outsourcing is going pretty well (for now!).
Secondly, we’ve managed to reach the audience we wanted to reach: associations (registered or de facto) that are fairly small, with small budgets. Most of them focus on education, the environment, social or cultural issues. Which is hardly surprising given Framasoft’s target audience.
Finally, Framaspace is used. More than half the spaces have regular connections. And people handle quite a lot of files (rather small files, which explains why very few spaces use more than one GB of the maximum 40 GB allowed).
We feel that our 2023 goals have been more than adequately met in terms of actions đ We could even say that it’s a success given the resources we’ve invested.
Offering « locked » spaces (for example, you can’t install the Nextcloud plugins of your choice on Framaspace, and only small associations or collectives can open a Framaspace) has had the expected frustrating effect. In fact, we have regularly referred people frustrated by these limitations to friendly structures such as Zaclys, IndieHosters, Cloud Girofle, Paquerette, Arawa, etc. This shows that we’re not taking a « slice of the cake », but helping to make it bigger.
Click on Li, Framaspace’s unicorn mascot, to support Framasoft. – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
Framaspace in 2024 (and 2025)
As you may have read in our ‘assessment of the assessment’, Framaspace is meeting a need, and Framasoft believes the response is pretty good. It’s far from perfect, of course, but for a small association that wants to get out of the box and align its values with its digital tools, Framaspace could be the answer.
But we’re not going to stop there! Framaspace is still in beta testing (and will probably be until the end of 2025!) and many improvements are still to come đ.
Support
First of all, we’re going to keep hosting spaces. Now that Framaspace is more stable, we think we can pick up the pace and host 2,500 spaces by the end of 2024 (i.e. more than triple the current number. Don’t worry!).
Next, we’ll continue our outsourcing initiatives. For example, by moving from Nextcloud 26 to Nextcloud 27 in late 2023 or early 2024. Each version brings a host of new features (see our friends at Arawa who give a summary presentation here and here).
Scenario under construction for a « tutorial in which you are the hero ». Sorry, the translator didn’t have the courage to translate every box!
We also want to provide documentation (and facilitation tools) to facilitate migration from OneDrive, Dropbox or GoogleDrive, and to simplify import/export between Nextcloud instances. For example, an association that has reached the 50 account limit on its Framaspace space and wants to migrate to a more powerful Nextcloud with our friends at IndieHosters would be able to transfer its data – files, calendars, contacts, etc. – in a more automated way.
Finally, we are aware that one of the major weaknesses of Nextcloud (and by extension Framaspace) is the difficulty of « onboarding » novices to a (too?) rich and sometimes (very?) confusing interface. That’s why we want to integrate the free IntroJS tool into Nextcloud to highlight certain parts of the software and make it easier to learn. See the video below.
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Video demonstration of how IntroJS has been integrated into Nextcloud to make it easier to learn.
In 2024, we will of course continue our efforts to make Nextcloud better known in the French-speaking world.
For example, we have already subtitled a number of Nextcloud presentation videos in French. But we’d like to go further. For example, we’d like to redo the voice-overs or translate the documentation (flyers, brochures, etc.).
Video of a Nextcloud promotional video, originally in English only and subtitled by Framasoft.
Framasoft will also continue to promote Nextcloud and Framaspace through conferences, webinars, interviews, etc.
We will also continue to share our experience and feedback with the CHATONS community, many of whose members offer services based on Nextcloud. We think we’ve acquired a certain amount of knowledge and know-how around Nextcloud, but above all we know that we still have a lot to learn.
Finally, we’re going to start getting in touch with the heads of associative networks (Collectif Associations Citoyennes, Mouvement Associatif, popular education networks, but also networks such as Associations Mode d’Emploi, Solidatech, AssociathĂšque, etc.) to present Framaspace, and highlight what Nextcloud can do (or can’t do!) in terms of collaborative ethical digital technology. The ultimate aim is to assess its relevance as a « digital commons of general interest » for associations.
Framaspace & Nextcloud user community
In 2024, we will continue our work to promote, animate and coordinate a community of Nextcloud software users on the Framaspace forum.
We will also publish a website for the OPEN-L Observatory (« Observatory of Free Digital Practices and Experiences »), which will publicly host the various surveys (and their results!) that Framasoft will have conducted among its audiences. This site will be open to other organisations wishing to share their feedback. The aim is not to reinvent the wheel, but to make it easier to objectify the needs (and frustrations) of users.
Of course, we will continue to improve both Framaspace and Nextcloud. We’re lucky (and happy) to have Thomas, one of the world’s leading contributors from outside Nextcloud GmbH, on our staff.
This means that Framasoft (through Framadrive, Framagenda and now Framaspace) is taking a very active part in this digital commons that is the Nextcloud software.
On a more ‘internal’ note, in the coming months we should be increasing our capacity to work on the Framaspace project within Framasoft: Thomas, currently the lead developer on Mobilizon, will shift up to 50% of his time to Framaspace, and Pierre-Yves, currently co-director of Framasoft, will leave this role to concentrate on the association’s digital services (including Framaspace, of course).
Empowering ‘off-market’ structures
We have many policy ambitions for the Framaspace project (see our launch article – only in French, sorry!).
To achieve this, we will use surveys to gather information about the needs (both functional and more political) of the structures we host. Depending on the results, and if resources allow, we will be able to adapt Framaspace to the needs of its users.
We have noticed that in the associations we support, the issue of digital tools often lies with one or two volunteers, who sometimes struggle to implement a change management policy or convince their board. So we also want to produce « practical information sheets » to make life easier for these key people. « For example, we’ll look at how to carry out a digital diagnosis of my association, or how to convince my board to switch from Gdrive or Dropbox to Framaspace.
Finally, and we are aware of the high demand for this item, we would like to pool funding for new features in Framaspace.
We will focus on :
The possibility of managing your members in Framaspace (members, categories, identity card, subscriptions, membership reminders, etc.) using the (fabulous) free association management software Paheko;
The possibility of managing your association’s accounts (data entry, balance sheet, profit and loss, choice of chart of accounts, etc.), again thanks to Paheko;
allow associations that wish to do so to publish pages presenting their structure and activities. To do this, we want to make it possible to publish a mini-website presenting the organisation (written in Framaspace’s « Collectives » application).
Help Li, Framaspace’s unicorn mascot, Push back Demondrive by supporting Framasoft ! – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
Moulaga needed!
As you can see, the Framaspace 2024 roadmap is already very full!
Please note: none of the items below are firm commitments on our part. They’re just our wishes, what we want to implement in the coming year. It’s all very ambitious. And like any ambition, we need to know what resources we can devote to it.
As we said, Framaspace is a project with a large deficit. That’s a good thing: it’s not intended to be profitable, much less to make a profit. However, it is the resources you entrust to us (i.e. your donations) that enable us to act.Therefore, we sincerely believe that âŹ1 (or âŹ100 or âŹ1,000, eh! đ ) donated to Framasoft really does help to change things and have a positive impact on the digital world ‘outside the market’.That’s why we invite you, if you can, to support Framasoft with a donation, so that we can continue our work, and especially to maintain and develop the Framaspace project.Once again this year we need you, your support, your sharing to help us regain ground on the toxic GAFAM web and multiply the number of ethical digital spaces.So we’ve asked David Revoy to help us present this on our « Support Framasoft » page, which we invite you to visit (because it’s beautiful) and above all to share as widely as possible:
Click to support us – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
If we are to balance our budget for 2024, we have six weeks to raise âŹ183,478: we can’t do it without your help!
