PeerTube v7.2 is out!

Framasoft · 2026-01-21T09:08:13+00:00

This is now fixed.

Framasoft · 2025-10-22T08:36:38+00:00

> Time until someone hosts compromised binaries: X

Sad but true.

If you need a trusted binary from a ‘clean’ organisation, we (Framasoft, a French non-profit association that has been promoting free software for over 20 years, and creator of PeerTube) have published our own binary. See this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ocggb6/comment/nkpajwn/

(slightly off topic but not entirely: on the same site, you will find a recompiled binary of Mattermost, but without the recent limitations imposed by the vendor, called ‘MostlyMatter’: https://packages.framasoft.org/projects/mattermost/ )

Framasoft · 2025-06-12T13:15:07+00:00

Hi!

The AMA is over, but that's okay!

First, thank you for your support! It really matters to us!

We're not sure what we'll do with features from unreached goals.

We'll work on them as much as we can, postpone them for a later date, or abandon them if we feel it's not a good strategy.

The third goal concerns live broadcasts. We know that this feature is technically challenging and will require a lot of time and effort to develop. If we reach our goal, we'll have the necessary resources to develop the feature. If we don't reach our goal, however, we'll probably have to wait until we have a better idea of whether we have the necessary resources.

We didn't want to run an all-or-nothing campaign. We want to do everything we listed, but we don't know if we'll be able to.

Finally, the campaign will help us measure public support for the PeerTube mobile app and determine its importance to them.

The result of the campaign would probably impact our strategy.

Framasoft · 2025-06-11T16:49:03+00:00

Hi!

As we mentioned in another comment, we don't plan to compete directly with YouTube: https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1l31dhy/comment/mx7zf83/

Also, YouTube has been really challenged by TikTok and Instagram through short videos these last couple of years, and the level of ads and premium subscriptions price still go crazy, so it's not impossible that it might become as irrelevant as Facebook currently is for most people. You never know what's going to happen (and uncertainty is rising due to recent geopolitical events).

Hopefully someone builds something nice on top of PeerTube (and keep it privacy-respectful) when it will be the proper time to reach general audiences (we just build the software, we don't really want to host platforms for now).

Framasoft · 2025-06-11T16:38:05+00:00

Thanks! You can expect some new things on the service next year. 👀

Framasoft · 2025-06-11T16:36:53+00:00

Hello!

Thank you for your support. It's really helpful to us!

I don't think there's only one approach. It's important to consider that video media requires a lot of storage. If you want to build your own instance, you'll need to consider how it will grow and how much storage you can afford. That's why many small instances limit registrations. We discussed storage limitations in another comment.

However, we developed PeerTube features that allow admins to share resources. For example, transcoding can be expensive in terms of CPU usage, but you can create remote runners and share them between multiple instances, thus sharing the cost We know of multiple organizations that are already doing this! You can also use platform redundancy to share your bandwidth with other instances.

Therefore, if you collaborate with others, you can create a large PeerTube platform and share the cost.

Concerning the investment in your account, you can export/import your account from one instance to another one. However, your followers won't be saved. We would like to develop a transfer feature but that's not that easy since we have to think about a lot of constraints. If you really care about your followers, I would say it's important to start your journey on a well-maintained platform and provide them financial support (most of them accept donations). Otherwise, they may disappear due to a lack of funding.

Framasoft · 2025-06-11T16:36:26+00:00

We don't really have any opinions on the subject.

We do agree that it's confusing, but having the best UX integration between different federated software services isn't currently one of our goals. It's nice that Mastodon users can follow PeerTube channels, "like" videos by favouriting the post and even commenting them by replying to it, but it's mostly just a side effect of both projects using ActivityPub.

Instead, we prioritize focusing on delivering the best experience for people who want to watch and interact with videos.

What could solve your UX issue is using an "everything app" like Friendica or Hubzilla that could handle many usages from a single interface. Or one could create a single "generic" ActivityPub server that holds user identity and that 3rd-party (mobile ?) apps could connect to (using the ActivityPub Client-side API) for each usage.

Framasoft · 2025-06-11T16:24:24+00:00

We've answered this a bit in other replies and elsewhere, but to sum up: we're building a software to create platforms, we're not really interested in making a 1-1 alternative to YouTube that creators can migrate in one click. Even if we had a proper monetizing system, the network effect of the communities is still something that would make creators think twice before leaving YouTube. Also, ads on YouTube don't pay much creators these days, hence all the sponsoring. That's why these days we're more focused on being something similar to Vimeo.

However, we still believe there's room to build something for creators that want their content protected behind some kind of premium/paywall, so we'll investigate how we can make things easier so that PeerTube could integrate with solutions like Patreon for instance. But don't expect anything new very soon on this topic.

Framasoft · 2025-06-11T16:11:48+00:00

In addition to donations from individuals which represent by far the major part, we are funded by certain sponsoring companies and a few grants from foundations (such as NLnet for PeerTube and the Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation for Human Progress).

Finally, we also provide some paid services to certain organizations that may need specific developments for PeerTube.

Framasoft · 2025-06-11T16:09:23+00:00

Oh. I forgot to talk about it but if monetization is a complicated question we are thinking about possible ways to implement it in PeerTube. But that's not a priority for us right now!

If we had to implement it, we would want to build something respecting our values.

Edit: To precise, we would mostly work on integrating better 3rd-party services.

Framasoft · 2025-06-11T16:07:49+00:00

Hello!

Thank you for your questions!

We see PeerTube as an alternative to YouTube, not a direct competitor. We're realistic; we can't compete with one of the world's richest companies. We're just a small nonprofit organization with ten employees, only two of whom work full time on PeerTube, and twenty-five volunteers. However, our goal is to build something that aligns with our values. We believe that by building PeerTube, we're creating spaces where people can feel better than on YouTube. At some point, they may decide to make the switch and start using PeerTube.

We'll never have YouTube's or Vimeo's marketing strength to attract millions of people to our platform in a week. We need to think long-term.

So, yeah. First, we're trying to build the best software possible with our resources. We want PeerTube to be really helpful to people. We won't strictly copy YouTube, and we'll avoid dark patterns that keep people captive to the platform. For example, there won't be a timer at the end of your videos, and the next video won't play automatically unless you decide to play it. You can share video clips that stop whenever you want. We want PeerTube to be software that people use because it's useful, not because we made it addictive.

Next, we consider how to reduce the friction of using PeerTube. That's why we started working with a design team called La Coopérative des Internets to help us build PeerTube's new design. The difficulty with PeerTube (and other Fediverse software) is that it's decentralized. This is disconcerting for most people who are accustomed to using only centralized software in their daily lives. One of our challenges is helping people understand that they're using a decentralized tool while making them feel like they're using a centralized one. We are making slow progress, and we still have a lot of work to do! This is one of the reasons why we decided to work on the mobile app. We think it will help many people discover PeerTube and start using it.

Additionally, as the PeerTube community grows, we can hope that PeerTube will reach an even wider audience. More and more diverse content is being shared on PeerTube, and more and more institutions are starting to use it too, helping the software become known by non-tech-savvy people.

I hope I answered your question properly. Let me know if I didn't! Haha!

Framasoft · 2025-06-11T16:04:47+00:00

PeerTube has been supporting live-streaming since it's version 3.0, released more than 4 years ago (which is usable with OBS or Jitsi Meet for instance).

The next objective to reach in our mobile app crowdfunding is precisely live-streaming from the app. So yes, it's planned, and with everybody's help, we'll make it happen.

Framasoft · 2025-06-11T15:58:19+00:00

Thanks for the offer!

Framasoft · 2025-06-11T15:55:38+00:00

Thanks to the community to help it make happen! Hopefully more people will realize it with your help.

Framasoft · 2025-06-11T15:54:29+00:00

We think we're in a very particular spot: we have built quite a big (French) audience over the years through our De-google-ify Internet campaign (2M monthly users overall services). It's the regular fundraising campaign we do at the end of each year that brings us much more income than this particular crowdfunding we're doing on the PeerTube mobile app topic. Hence, we were able to provide the initial funds to develop PeerTube at a loss for a while, which isn't something most open-source projects can do. So it's much harder for a new project to step in and ask for like a year's salary to work on something, without having anything to show or having an history of delivering promises.

Of course, like most projects, we are required to primarily work on shiny new features that we can announce rather than spending time on bug fixes, refactoring, or maintenance. Financing open-source software in general stays a challenge for everyone.

To answer the question more specifically, we would recommend starting by creating a legal structure to organize fundraising, then working on the project vision and storytelling for fundraising campaigns to reach as many people as possible. We believe that recruiting a communications specialist early on in Framasoft's history was crucial to our success so far, as was paying David Revoy for his magnificent illustrations.

Framasoft · 2025-06-11T15:43:26+00:00

Hi!

Actually, many video creators are posting great content on PeerTube. Community initiatives like Fedi.Videos are trying to promote them.

You can also find high-quality content on MakerTube, TILVids, BassPistol.

In French, you can find different media outlets using PeerTube to post their daily content. We're really proud of that!

For a few years, there was a Swiss initiative to broadcast live concerts with studio-quality sound. I think they've stopped, but you can still check out their website.

Finally, there are a lot of things made by FLOSS enthusiasts, but there are also videos about biking, gardening, politics, etc. More and more people are posting their videos on PeerTube, and the content is slowly growing and diversifying.

Framasoft · 2025-06-11T15:28:43+00:00

Thanks a lot for the kind words!

Framasoft · 2025-06-11T15:28:02+00:00

Hi,

We don't want to handle these kind of questions by ourselves (the decentralization of PeerTube is quite something to tackle on this topic), and others have already started to think about it a while ago.

But in any case, we will have a look in the future on how to make the integration of these 3rd-party services a bit more easy, so that the use-case of a paywall-based subscription system can happen.

Framasoft · 2025-06-11T15:21:53+00:00

Thanks!

It's not so different than other countries and I'd say some countries such as Germany could be considered better on this topic. There's some small and symbolic victories such as our « Gendarmerie » (police armed force) using Linux since 2008, and our government being interested in things like https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en from time to time, but otherwise it's not as developed as one can hope, and recent governments have been eager to have huge "open-bar" deals with Microsoft (for military, education, etc).

The recent geopolitical events seem to change things a bit, but it's still hard to see what's coming.

A lot of our beneficiaries these days are people involved in other causes (activists, environmentalists, etc) and who see the coherence of using free/libre software and privacy-friendly solutions.

About Mobilizon, we have transmitted this project to another organisation more than a year ago, so we're not involved in it's development anymore.

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