Mobilizon is the alternative we have been developing since 2019 so that everyone can emancipate their events and groups from Facebook. Except, unlike Facebook, Mobilizon is not a single platform. It is a software that specialists can install on a server to create multiple events and groups platforms (called « instances »), which can be linked together within a federation.

We do host Mobilizon.fr, but it is restricted to French speaking users (otherwise we wouldn’t be able to moderate). But we’ve got you covered : we propose a selection of other Mobilizon hosters on Mobilizon.org.

It has been just under a year since we published the second version (« v2 ») of Mobilizon. That release brings us updates (time zones adjustment, improvements on language display, etc.), new features (possibility to follow the public activities of a group without having to join, exporting the attendants list of my event, possibility to search among past events, etc.) and some small tweaks (emails design, cards presenting events or groups appearance, etc.).

As we announced at the time, we wanted to develop in 2022 features that would improve content discovery (events, groups, their public pages, public articles of these groups). This is the path we have followed (well, when we say « we », we mean mainly ONE paid developer who devotes a part of his time to the project).

Let’s look around and see what this new version brings us!

Mobilizon Search Index, a global search engine to explore events and groups

As we know it was not always easy to find events or groups on Mobilizon, we worked for most of the year on creating Mobilizon Search Index, a new gateway to Mobilizon.

What can Mobilizon Search Index do for you

This tool allows you to search and explore Mobilizon by different ways:

• if you are looking for a specific event or group, use the search bar
• if you want to discover events by subject, browse through categories cards
• if you want to find events nearby, geolocate yourself
• if you want to discover popular groups, there is a category for that!
• if you want to attend online events, we also highlight them

 

Mobilizon Search Index has been designed to inform you while respecting your attention:

• The results will be the same for everyone, based only on your search (and your browser’s language), and absolutely not pre-sorted according to a profile (because there is no profiling, here!).
• The results are presented in a clear and detailed way, to avoid the attention war leading to clickbait thumbnails and all caps over-the-top titles.
• Search filters give you the power to sort the results out and display those you really want.
• If you want to see in detail the content of an event or a group, Mobilizon Search Index will redirect you directly to the instance where it is hosted (since we have no interest in locking you into the search engine’s website). This is a way to help anyone experience and understand the notion of federation.

Let’s have a look at the new features of this search results page. First of all, you can choose the results display mode (list or map) by clicking on the top-right button.

 

Then you can filter the results according to several criteria. Look at the left-hand column to see which filters are already active and change them if needed:

• type of content (events, groups or both)
• online events
• event date
• distance
• categories
• event status (confirme, tentative or cancelled)
• language

You can also sort the results by using the top right button (only in the « List » mode display). If your results are events and groups, this feature does not apply, you must first filter by content type.

If your results are events, you can sort by 6 different criteria:

• best match (only relevant when using the search bar)
• event date (from earliest to latest)
• most recently published
• least recently published
• with the most participants

If your results are groups, you can sort by 2 different criteria:

• best match (only relevant when using the search bar)
• number of members (from largest to smallest)

Our gateway to explore Mobilizon contents

We know that by offering a single gateway to the Mobilizon federation, the structure that holds the keys to that gate gets great powers. They get the power to decide what will be accepted (or rejected) in the search directory. They get the power to record who searched for what, when, from where. And they get the power to intervene in the order and display of the results.

It is on such power mechanisms that Facebook has built its monopoly. Obviously, at Framasoft, we do not seek to be in a position of power… and even less to follow Meta’s (bad) example ! Nevertheless, we want to show the emancipating potential of this software which allows to reclaim the means to gather.

As we already did with Sepia Search (our search engine to explore contents upload on PeerTube), we take the responsibility of opening Mobilizon Search Index, our gateway to Mobilizon.

An a posteriori moderated search engine

Not all Mobilizon instances will be referenced on Mobilizon Search Index. This search engine will be based on the list of instances we maintain at https://instances.joinmobilizon.org. To date, this list consists of 83 instances, but we hope that more and more organizations will use Mobilizon.

This list is aligned with the policy for all of the services we offer:

• compliance with French law
• compliance with our Terms and Conditions of Use
• respect of our moderation policy (FR only, for now)

Thus, if we are notified of an instance where contents explicitly condone terrorism or promote historical revisionism, we will remove it from the index (non-compliance with French laws, which we insist on in our TOS). Such removal will eliminate all events and groups hosted by that instance from the search results.

On the other hand, if one or more people come to abuse the time of our moderators with inappropriate and abusive reports, their words will be discredited and ignored (as indicated in our moderation policy (FR)).

However, we hope not to have to moderate this list too much in order to offer everyone the opportunity to discover the multitude of events and groups created on Mobilizon.

A public indexing tool, reproducible and adaptable to your conditions

The source code, the « recipe » of Mobilizon Search Index, is transparent. We publish it on our software forge and we provides an API that other software (including Mobilizon instances) can use.

So anyone is free to set and host their own instance list, indexing engine and search site, by copying and adapting what we have created. It is up to you to take the power (and responsibilities) by hosting your own Mobilizon search engine, set up and moderated according to your culture, your indexing policy and your values!

A V3 to improve content discovery

A new design for the homepage and the search results page

This is the main new feature of this V3, as it was obvious to us that we would implement all the work done on Mobilizon Search Index in Mobilizon software. This V3 offers you new homepage and the search results page design.

On this new homepage, in addition to a total makeover of the graphic interface (do you like it?), we have changed the order in which the different contents are displayed:

• the search bar is now more visible and you can precise a localization
• you have 3 categories cards displayed (we highlight those with the most events)
• 2 sections highlight events nearby and popular groups nearby your location (if you use the Geolocate me button or if you precise in your account’s preferences a city or region)
• a new section is dedicated to upcoming online events
• a section for the last published events on your instance and its federation

Our goal is to increase your chances of discovering events and groups that you never knew existed, to make the diversity of content published on Mobilizon more visible.

When you use the homepage search bar, Mobilizon displays a new search results page using Mobilizon Search Index design on which you can find all the features detailed above (map/list vue, filter system, sorting sytem). You even have one more critera in the left-hand column: you can choose results in your instance’s network or on the Fediverse.

If you are a Mobilizon instance’s administrator, you can choose and set up which search engine you want to use by default.

Also, the section « These events may interest you », placed at the bottom of events, uses new criteria (categories, event language and distance if the event has a physical address) in addition to tags to recommend you more relevant events.

Necessary substantive changes

During this year, we have modified many elements of Mobilizon in order not to build up technical debt (switch to VueJS 3, migration of the CSS framework from Bulma to Tailwind, etc.). Those changes are not visible when using Mobilizon but are necessary. They already give you the possibility of using a dark theme and they will make it easier for us to offer you more features (e.g. a theme system) in the future.

And we now offer administrators the possibility to use metrics tools (Matomo and Plausible) on their Mobilizon instance that allow them to have additional data (e.g. number of views on a page or number of views of an event) in addition to the stats provided by the software itself.

Mobilizon is still financed thanks to your donations

This v3 of Mobilizon has been partly financed on our 2022 budget, so directly thanks to the donations of the people who support Framasoft, and partly by the NLnet Foundation.

We don’t yet know exactly what we’re going to do on Mobilizon in 2023, but we know you’d love us to develop a feature for events import, ability for event organizers to privately contact attendees, and ability to fill in arbitrary contact information for event location.

Our new campaign Collectivize Internet / Convivialize Internet (in French) is going to require a lot of our energy, but be sure that we will hear your feedback to take them into account. So if you can (at the period we are aware that it is particularly complicated), and if you want to, please support the actions of our association.

At the time of publishing, we are still missing 178 200 € to finance our yearly budget and make everything we want to do in 2023 happen.

If you can (especially in these hard times) and if you want to, thanks for supporting our non-profit and our actions.

 

Soutenir Framasoft

 

Helpful links

• Mobilizon official website
• Our French speaking instance Mobilizon.fr
• Discover the federation on Mobilizon.org
• See the source code of Mobilizon
• See the source code of Mobilizon Search Index
• Support Framasoft

Customization, content discovery, empowering through more control… Here is an overview of the new version of our software solution to create alternative platforms to YouTube and federate them together.

PeerTube is a free software that, once installed on a server, generates a video hosting platform. This platform can be federated, to share its video catalog with other PeerTube platforms. It also provides a resilient video broadcasting system, which combines peer-to-peer and traditional streaming.

Today, PeerTube is a whole ecosystem: with an index of nearly 900 public « instances » (that’s how a PeerTube server is called), a search engine, dozens of plugins to adapt one’s instance to the needs of the content creators they hosts… But also tens of thousands of lines of code and hundreds of thousands of videos.

A year of work since adding live streams

Last January, the 3rd version (v3) of PeerTube was released. The big new feature was the ability to stream live videos in peer-to-peer.

Late March 2021, version 3.1 was released, with improved video transcoding, interface, subscriptions…

Version 3.2 of PeerTube was released by the end of May. It allows content creators to customize their channels. Viewers also get better control of their viewing (automatic recover of views of downloads when interrupted, improvement on the video player contextual menu…).

Late July, version 3.3 offers administrators of a PeerTube instance homepage customization: add text, banners, highlight videos, channels, playlists. In addition, playlists now appear in search results, we have also shortened the web addresses of videos, channels and accounts, and the display of languages that read from right to left is now fully supported.

In early September, PeerTube version 3.4 was released. The video player became more convenient and fluid. Instance administrators can now federate only to an account or a channel (without having to federate with the whole instance that hosts them). But above all, it is now possible to filter videos on a page that displays several videos. For example, on the page of a channel you can display only the videos that are in French and that talk about cooking.

A v4 by 2022, to give you even more control

The fourth version of PeerTube is scheduled for late 2021/early 2022. But as of today, we are publishing the Release Candidate of this v4, that is to say, the almost finished version that we will test for bugs and unexpected behavior. So we can already tell you about the new features!

The big new feature of this v4 is the table view of all the videos of an instance. It will facilitate instances administration and moderation by allowing you to select a batch of videos to apply the same action in bulk: delete them, block them, transcode them to or delete a certain video format, etc.

The advanced filter features make this bulk processing easier, by distinguishing between local videos (hosted on one’s own server) and remote videos (hosted on servers with which one has federated), or by sorting by publication date, for example.

Content creators will also be able to benefit from features to better manage all the videos on their PeerTube channels or view their subscribers. For now, this subscriber view is basic and doesn’t allow for (much) action, but it’s a foundation we’ll be able to build on to meet many needs.

Another new low-tech feature in PeerTube is the introduction of 144p video resolution. This is very low bandwidth-friendly, and can be very useful for weak connections, audio broadcasts, or videos where you don’t need to see very fine details.

Finally, the release of this v4 is the occasion of a big spring winter cleaning. The configuration, the code, but also the API (that allows other software to interact with PeerTube) have been reviewed, modified and improved.

 

Our contributions to the PeerTube ecosystem

Indeed, PeerTube is now an ecosystem of instances, content creators, third party clients, plugins, contributors… An ecosystem of which we are but one member.

Throughout the year, we have improved the JoinPeertube FAQ, moderated our search engine index, responded to issues (software feedback) and reviewed pull requests (code contributions). After a recent audit offered by NGI, we worked on the code of the official JoinPeertube website to improve its accessibility.

We also funded and supported two external developments that greatly improve the live experience. On one hand, we helped the PeerTube Live Chat plugin. It allows instances adminnistrators to add chat functionality to their content creators’ live streams. On the other hand, the PeerTube Live App, which allows anyone with a PeerTube account to broadcast lives from their Android smartphones (available here on Fdroid and here on the Google Playstore).

 

 

One of the recent evolutions of the PeerTube ecosystem is the multiplication of large instances, which host many videos. This creates new uses and new expectations that we try to meet.

For example, we communicate with one team of the French Ministry of Education, that works on apps.education.fr, a tool where teachers in France can find many freeèlibre services, including PeerTube hosting. Our goal is to get a better understanding of their needs and use cases, and to find ways to facilitate their contribution to the PeerTube community.

Any plans for PeerTube in 2022…?

The first project is to test this v4 Release Candidate, collect feedback, apply fixes to release a stable v4 by the end of 2021 / early 2022. After that, it will probably be necessary to take some time to rest, and prepare a roadmap for the upcoming year.

Even if we don’t know yet what form PeerTube v5 will take, we can already tell you about our intuitions, and especially the points that caught our attention:

• Eliminate frustration points and improve usability;
• Work on giving even more control to instance managers as well as to video makers (mass processing of videos, acting on subscriber lists, etc.);
• Improve the transcoding and its displaying (display of the time remaining before publishing the video, why not work on deporting transcoding tasks to a remote server…);
• Add light-weight editing tools for videos (cut the beginning/end of a video, etc.);
• Work on automatic import of channels and videos hosted on other mainstream platforms;
• Basic import/export tools for a PeerTube account to facilitate migration between two instances.

The list is far from complete and we’ll keep listening to your ideas (for example on our forum)… But we already know that we won’t be able to do everything, not by ourselves.

Support Framasoft to support PeerTube

In 2021, we received a 50 000 € grant from NLnet (from European funds) for our work on PeerTube. This external funding allowed us to avoid having to prioritize « sexier » features in order to get a successful crowdfunding. So it’s thanks to this support from NLnet that we were able to make significant improvements that are not super-bankable, but necessary when you want a mature software.

The growing success of PeerTube implies an increasing amount of work to maintain and respond to the people who use it: understanding and solving bug reports, reviewing and integration of code contributions (commits), answering questions and requests on the forum, on the chat and on the software forge (already 3100 issues processed for about 400 pending)… All this work, not very visible, is mainly done by Framasoft.

We estimate (roughly) that the NLnet grant will have financed two thirds of the total cost of this project in 2021. This means that we have taken 25 000 € from the annual budget of the Framasoft association, so from the donations of the people who support us. We did not ask NLnet for 2022 funding on PeerTube (because we did it for another of our projects: Mobilizon).

However, Framasoft is (and wishes to remain) a small not-for-profit association https://framasoft.org/en/association , with about 40 members, including 10 employees. We maintain many actions (summarized in a deck of cards to flip on our donation page), and only one of our developers can devote about three quarters of his time to PeerTube.

If you would like to support the funding of PeerTube in 2022, please donate to Framasoft. By the way, in France, the Framasoft association is recognized as being of general interest and thus gives rights to tax deductions (so that a donation of 100 € will be – after tax deduction – 34 € for French taxpayers).

Thus, in addition to supporting PeerTube, you will finance many actions to facilitate digital emancipation, and emancipation through digital.

We count on your contribution!

Support Framasoft

 

Helpful links

• PeerTube official website
• Discover videos on the search engine Sepia Search
• See PeerTubube source code
• Support Framasoft

Mobilizon is our answer to the question: « How can we make it so that Climate Walks and demonstrations are not organized on Facebook? » This tool allows you to create groups, pages and events, without having to offer your data, update your status, tag your friends, share your photos…

First, you will need to find where to register on Mobilizon. We do host Mobilizon.fr, but it is restricted to French speaking users (otherwise we wouldn’t be able to moderate). But we’ve got you covered: we propose a selection of other Mobilizon hosters on Mobilizon.org.

Come again: what is Mobilizon?

Mobilizon is first and foremost a software, that web-hosters can install on a server, in order to create a platform, a Mobilizon web site. This Mobilizon web site can federate and thus synchronize its data with other Mobilizon web sites.

Imagine if Facebook were a network with several entry points, like emails. You would have the choice to sign up with this or that Facebook provider (just like you have the choice of your email provider). You’d choose such hoster because you feel you can trust them with your data, or to enforce a fair moderation. However, your Facebook provider would give you access to as many events and groups in the network as possible, because it would federate with the other hosts (just as you can receive emails from anyone, regardless of their provider).

That’s what Mobilizon is: a federated tool to publish your events, your pages, your information… and to focus on organizing your group.

One year of updates from your feedbacks

It’s been a little over a year since we published the first version (v1) of Mobilizon. Let’s admit that proposing a tool to organize and gather your group in the midst of confinements and curfews was not such a smart idea!

Yet Mobilizon is a promising software, with more than 75 public hosts (we’re calling them instances) and an already international scope. It must be said that for the past year, we have been updating the software to provide you with much needed features.

Last March, we released version 1.1, which added a history of activities, the ability to display events by geographic proximity and access to RSS feeds (to subscribe to news feeds and not miss anything).

In late June, we released version 1.2, which includes a notification system (useful for informing participants of your event), and a clear improvement of the interface (more pleasant on mobile)

In mid-August, we released version 1.3 of Mobilizon. It allows a better management of groups, whose administrators or moderators can edit events or blog posts. Moreover, you can now add many metadata to events: accessibility level, Twitter account, live stream address…

Finally, we worked in partnership with Koena Connect (a French accessibility company) to improve the accessibility of Mobilizon. Koena Connect provided a direct feedback channel to the persons who find accessibility issues with our software.

Mobilizon v2, a tool designed to serve you

Since this summer, we have been working hard (with our team of ONE paid developer who devotes 75% of his time to the project) to implement features inspired by your comments and requests.

From now on, it is possible for one of your Mobilizon profiles to follow the public activities of a group without having to join. You will have these events on your « My Events » page (now with a new filter system to display events). They will also appear on your home page and in your emails notifications (that you can turn off), as soon as this group publishes a public event.

People who organize events can now export a list of attendants, for example to check who has signed up and who comes. This list is downloadable in the most common formats (csv, odf, pdf), and for now only contains the names of profiles who have clicked « Participate » (and messages from anonymous accounts). But this is the beginning of a work that could be expanded, depending on your expectations.

Mobilizon v2 solves a real headache (and it was one to develop :p!): dealing with time zones. Now, if you organize an event in London, the time of your event will be associated with the British time zone by default.

Mobilizon will then convert the time for people who want to register from France, by displaying the time of the event on Paris time, for example. For this, Mobilizon looks at the time zone declared by your web browser (and you can control this setting in your account). This also allows Mobilizon to send you « the event starts in an hour » reminder emails at the right time, i.e.: yours (what a pleasure!)

A lot of work has been done to correctly display right to left languages; we had to adapt the interface itself. The tricky part was to adapt to « bidirectional » cases, where two languages with different reading directions are mixed, for example Mobilizon’s interface in French and an event described in Arabic.

You have asked for it (a lot), and it is even more relevant in times of pandemic, you now have the possibility to define an event as online, without geographical location. We’ve also added a new filter to the Mobilizon search, so you can see only « online » events among your results.

About the search engine, it is now possible to search among past events, just to find the ones that you liked.

We have implemented an automatic detection of the language of the events. When you write your event title and description, Mobilizon will assign a language to it. This allows for better accessibility for people who use a screen reader, but also improves on displaying the time of your event in its social media preview.

Finally, there are many, many tweaks that may seem small but are life changing. We worked on the emails look, on the cards presenting events or groups, and improved on the public view of groups (the alternative to Facebook « pages »). We also made progress in digital accessibility thanks to our exchanges with Koena.

Mobilizon can now easily run on ARM machines, which will facilitate self-hosting on nanocomputers (like Raspberry Pi) or with Yunohost, for example.

Join the Mobilizon Community

Mobilizon is still in the early stages of its life, with a very motivated community. There are lively discussions in our Matrix Room! The contributors who translate Mobilizon are amazingly efficient (thanks and lots of datalove to them!)

We don’t know exactly yet how we’ll improve on Mobilizon in 2022. Our intuitions tell us that we will have to work on making this solution better known to the people it could appeal to.

One way to manage it would be to improve content discovery (events, groups, their public page, the public articles of these groups) notably by working on search tools, filters, and so on.

But nothing is decided yet and we are eager to hear your feedback (on our forum or our Matrix lounge, for example) to know what direction to give to Mobilizon.

 

As soon as we have a clearer roadmap proposal, we’ll be sure to let you know in the Mobilizon newsletter (so be sure to sign up here).

By coincidence, today the documentary Disappear – Under the Radar of Algorithms is released by ArteTV. Directed by Marc Meillassoux, this documentary features a performer trying to escape from the clutches of Facebook, and Mobilizon seems to play an important role in it…

Mobilizon is financed thanks to your donations

We remind you that this v2 of Mobilizon has been financed on our 2021 budget, so directly thanks to the donations of the people who support Framasoft. Indeed, Framasoft is a not-for-profit organization financed at 93% by your donations.

Because Framasoft is recognized as being of general interest by French authorities, donations to our association are tax deductible for French taxpayers. Thus, a donation of 100 € to Framasoft is, after deduction of income tax, 34 €.

We have explained, in this series of articles in French on the Framablog , all the actions that are financed by a donation to Framasoft. They are summarized in a set of (multilingual !) cards to click, flip and color on our support Framasoft page.

Thank you in advance for visiting and sharing this page. For those of you who can, please consider giving colors to our actions by making a donation to Framasoft.

Support Framasoft

 

 

Helpful links

• Mobilizon official website
• Our French speaking instance Mobilizon.fr
• Discover the federation on Mobilizon.org
• See the source code of Mobilizon
• Support Framasoft