Let's take this opportunity to review the latest developments and the improvements we will be making in the future.

Publish your videos wherever you are

This was our commitment during last May's crowdfunding campaign: to add a "creator mode" to the PeerTube app so you can upload your videos wherever you are, directly from your smartphone!

You will now find a "Creator" page in the app. From there, you can manage your channels and videos!

At the top of this page, you can access to your different channels to view and edit their information, or add a new channel.

In the middle of the page is a list of all your videos. Each video has a menu that allows you to perform actions on it. From there, you can edit the video information, download the video, add it to a playlist, or delete it.

Finally, at the bottom of the page, you will find the "Publish" button, which allows you to… publish a new video. (Which is surprising, indeed! 🙃)

When you click on it, a menu will pop, allowing you to choose a file from your phone or record a new video directly through the app.

Live streaming and importing from a URL are two options that are currently unavailable, but we plan to work on them in the future.

After selecting the video, you will be able to preview its content.

Then, all you have to do is select the channel where you want to publish your video and start uploading!

You will then receive a notification that your video is uploading in the background. While you wait, you can do something else in the PeerTube app or elsewhere on your smartphone. The upload will continue even if you are using another app!

Finally, on the last two pages, you can edit your video's information: thumbnail, subtitles, chapters, description, etc.

As with PeerTube for the Web, the mobile app lets you enter all the necessary information!

After clicking on "Publish my video", you will be redirected to the "Creator" page. There, you will find your new video and the upload status, if it is not yet complete.

As you can see, it's quick and easy to upload a video with the PeerTube app!

Of course, we can (and want to) improve the process even more. The paint is still wet, so we expect a few minor bugs. We will spend the next few weeks fixing them.

We also plan to add several new features. These include live streaming and the PeerTube studio, for example. There are two other major features, but they require a lot of work.

In any case, we are thrilled to finally allow you to upload your videos within the app. We look forward to continuing our work to improve your experience with PeerTube on mobile!

A year of improvements

Last year, we announced the release of our official PeerTube mobile app. Thanks to your support and that of the NLnet Foundation, we were able to hire Wicklow, a junior developer who had just completed an internship with us, to develop the app.

From the beginning, our plan was to move forward in stages. We focused on the main building blocks first, gradually adding new features and improving the app based on community feedback.

Developing a widely accessible application for PeerTube is no easy task. Its decentralized and federated nature of the platform is difficult for many people to grasp because they are accustomed to the centralized applications of Big Tech companies.

That's why we chose to work with La Coopérative des Internets. They designed the application to ensure its “decentralized” aspect causes minimal friction.

Thus, each new element added to the application is preceded by discussions and mock-ups created by a designer. We are delighted to have been able to integrate this process into the project!

This decentralized aspect of PeerTube not only poses a challenge in terms of user experience, but also presents a real headache when it comes to getting past the restrictions imposed by Google and Apple's app stores. For this reason, the list of available platforms in the app was limited for several months after its launch.

Needless to say, these restrictions were as frustrating for you as they were for us. Fortunately, we were able to publish an unrestricted version on F-Droid (although publishing on F-Droid was no easy task either, for other reasons… 😅).

Wicklow shared his experience in developing the app in two articles: Part 1 and Part 2.

Despite the many difficulties encountered during this journey, the PeerTube application is making steady progress! Since the beginning of the year, we have added the following features:

• the ability to log in to your own account;
• the ability to comment on and read comments on videos;
• the ability to receive notifications related to their account activity;
• enjoy playlists;
• report problematic videos;
• access your viewing history;
• download videos (on platforms that allow it);
• use gestures to change the volume and brightness;
• as well as many other diverse and varied improvements…

All these improvements were made possible thanks to your support! Thanks to crowdfunding in May, we raised the necessary funds to continue developing the application.

However, it is also the year-round donations made to Framasoft that finance the PeerTube project as a whole and allow us to look forward to the future of PeerTube with confidence.

If you can and want to contribute to PeerTube's robustness, consider making a donation and sharing our support page!

More to come…

Among the recent improvements to the app (including creator mode), several were part of our May commitments.

However, we haven't delivered everything yet! Several features are still in the pipeline and will arrive in the coming months.

These include, as mentioned above, the ability to play videos in the background (so you can turn off your screen while listening to a podcast), the ability to broadcast live directly via the app, and the release of a tablet-friendly version of the app.

PeerTube is an ambitious project.

Creating software that allows users to build alternative video platforms to those of the digital giants, centered around users (rather than the financial interests of a company), is a monumental challenge.

However, after ten years of development, more and more organizations recognize PeerTube as a reliable solution for distributing their videos.

Our solidarity-based economic model has given us a considerable advantage, allowing us to develop software we are proud of, without pleasing investors and submitting to their endless quest for quick returns.

You are our compass. Thanks to your feedback, we are developing PeerTube to best meet your needs.

The PeerTube mobile app follows the same model as the web app: we are building our vision of a digital world designed for everyone, brick by brick.

Admittedly, there is still a long way to go… but the path is Free!

Let's build the robustness of PeerTube and Framasoft

Framasoft (and therefore PeerTube) relies on your donations for funding!

By supporting our solidarity-based model, you are not only ensuring a secure, commercial-free future for PeerTube. You are also enabling Framasoft to provide 23 alternative, free services to more than 2 million users!

To achieve this, we need to raise €250,000 by the end of the year.
Thanks to over 3,000 donors, we have already raised around €150,000! 🥳

Help strengthen Framasoft by making a donation (66% of which is tax-deductible for French taxpayers) and spreading the word to your friends and family!

Together, let's prove that a non-commercial digital world accessible to all is possible!

The illustrations were designed by David Revoy and are licensed under CC-BY 4.0.

This version features a redesigned video player, an improved experience for importing videos and the ability to share channel management with other accounts!

A brand new video player

We created a new theme for the video player for the first time since the beginning of PeerTube development!

This new theme is named Lucide, in reference to the new icons used. It has been designed to be cleaner in order to better highlight the content.

Instead of bold, imposing icons, we opted for a more discreet style with finer lines on the buttons.

We also reworked the volume adjustment button to hide the volume state by default.

Finally, we moved the peer-to-peer information to the "Stats for nerds" menu, which is accessible by right-clicking on the player.

These few improvements breathe new life into PeerTube, giving it a more modern and professional look. They accomplish this by limiting the displayed information to what is strictly necessary. Less is more, as they say!

If you prefer the old theme, don't worry, it's still available! You can choose the player theme at the platform, channel, or video level.

These changes are in line with all the design improvements we've made this year. With each update, PeerTube becomes more customizable, allowing you to create a video platform that reflects your personality!

Manage your channels as a team

Since PeerTube's inception, many have asked us to add the ability to collaboratively manage a channel. This is, by the way, one of the most requested feature on our platform dedicated to idea suggestions!

Although use cases can very, it is often a critical need for organizations where several people are responsible for uploading new videos.

We are therefore delighted to announce that the collaborative channel management is now possible with PeerTube! 🥳

Thanks to this new feature you can now designate other members of your platform as editors.

Thus, a channel editor will be able to publish new videos, update or delete videos, playlists and comments, as well as add or delete synchronizations and update channel information!

Please note that editors cannot add or remove other editors, or delete the channel.

And more…

Of course, as with each new major version, many other improvements have been made.

Some are invisible to the general public, such as ilfarpro's contribution, which adds the ability to generate storyboards (you know, the thumbnails that display the different images from a video when you hover over the progress bar) through a remote runner instead of the PeerTube server.

Others, however, are much more visible!

For example, this is the case with the improvements made to the system for importing videos and channels from other platforms.

It is now possible to manually rerun a failed import. Also, in the case of a channel synchronization, PeerTube will try to run again a failed import after some time (at the next verification for synchronization, which interval, being 1h by default, is configurable by the platform's admin).

Finally, information about the status of a video import is now available in the video management page.

Another new improvement is that we have redesigned the appearance of notifications to better match PeerTube's overall theme!

A complete list of all changes made in this version is available in the dedicated changelog.

Looking back on a year of PeerTube

The year 2025 was marked by numerous advancements for the PeerTube project as a whole.

In total, we will have released four versions of PeerTube, all of which adhere to the guiding principle of making PeerTube easier for organizations to use.

Indeed, thanks to an NLnet grant, we were able to incorporate important features for this type of audience into the updates.

Keeping this in mind, we improved PeerTube's design this year and made it easier to customize. Previous versions included the ability to translate PeerTube emails, a redesigned the "About" and "Video Management" pages, and an improved interface for easier batch batch action management (e.g. deleting videos)!

We also added — and this was the big feature in version 7.3! — a configuration wizard to help admins set up their platform according to their profile (institution, community, or individual).

Among other major improvements this year, we can also mention a new moderation tool that allows you to monitor certain words, making it much easier to track comments on your videos or platform!

Finally, thanks to a previous NLnet grant, but also because it was important to us: we completely redesigned the management of sensitive content.

We have long known that people's sensitivity to a subject varies greatly and that the old system was too simplistic to truly meet the needs of video creators and their audiences.
That's why we collaborated with La Coopérative des Internets to design system that is more complex (but not more complicated) yet more true to reality!

Institutional recognition and adoption

In addition to technical improvements, the entire PeerTube ecosystem is making steady progress. Notably PeerTube was recognized as a digital public good by the DGPA (Digital Public Goods Alliance).

This recognition reinforces our confidence in the choices (both technical and political) we have made to ensure that PeerTube is a project that serves everyone.

When platforms like YouTube seem to continue to enshittify daily, more and more organizations (particularly medias outlets and institutions) are contacting us to make PeerTube their backup or even primary solution for hosting their videos.

We're really proud to see that PeerTube truly meets the needs of all these organizations allowing them to create a video platform that they control and that respects their viewers.

What PeerTube has in store for you in 2026…

First, regarding the mobile app, we aim to finalize the features promised during the crowdfunding campaign , including background video playback, live streaming, and TV apps.

If all goes well, background video playback should be available in early 2026!

Spoiler alert: The app's video maker mode will be available in a few days… 🤫

Regarding the PeerTube project as a whole, we would like to improve the experience for newcomers by reducing the effort required to find their first PeerTube platform!

The project is still in the planning stages and we still have a lot of work before it can happen. However, our ambitions could have a serious impact on the PeerTube ecosystem and we can't wait to get started!

Early next year, we will publish the PeerTube project's traditional roadmap. There, you will find more details about our vision for PeerTube in 2026. We are shaping this vision based on your ideas, so please feel free to share your suggestions on our dedicated platform!

To keep up with all our news (roadmap announcements, new projects, upcoming updates, etc.), you can subscribe to our social media channels and our newsletter.

PeerTube is developed by Framasoft, a french non-profit association raising awareness about digital issues. Framasoft is currently running a fundraising campaign to finance the year 2026.

At the time of writing, there are just over three weeks left to reach our goal of €250,000. However, we have only raised 24% of this target so far.

So if you appreciate PeerTube and would like to support its development, please consider making a donation (66% tax deductible for French residents) and help build a bright future for PeerTube!

Emails in your language!

Until now, emails sent by PeerTube platforms were only available in English, regardless of the user's language. This could cause confusion for non-native English speakers, making it difficult to use PeerTube in a professional context.

This was one of the most popular requests on our community suggestions page: it is now possible to translate emails into all the languages available on PeerTube! Some languages, such as French and Chinese, have already been fully translated, meaning you can now receive emails in these languages from this version onwards! We encourage the community to help us translate emails, as well as other parts of PeerTube, on our translation platform (contributing guide is available at https://docs.joinpeertube.org/support/doc/translation).

Configuring your platform

We have significantly enhanced the user experience and interface to assist administrators in configuring their platform.. The horizontal menu has been replaced with a new side menu for navigating between setting pages, which is more user-friendly.

A new configuration page called Customisation has been added, allowing admins to easily change their platform's main colors and shapes. For example, it is now possible to replace PeerTube's orange color with blue or make the buttons more rounded with just a few clicks. These new settings make it much easier to customise a PeerTube platform.

Another configuration page called Logo has also been added. This allows admins to configure the icons and logos displayed on their platform, including the header icon on the web and mobile versions, the favicon, the banner, the image displayed on social media, etc.

This new version also features a wizard to help admins configure their PeerTube platform. Once logged into your admin account, you can easily set up elements such as your platform's name, description, logo and main color, as well as choosing a preconfiguration based on the type of platform you want to administer, such as private, community or institutional.

If you are caught up in the excitement of using your PeerTube instance during installation and do not feel like using the wizard, you can launch it later by going to your platform's settings.

Schedule your live streams

Thanks to a contribution (made in live on PeerTube), it is now possible to schedule streams. To do this, simply go to the live stream settings and enter the start date and time in the relevant section.

The scheduled date of the live stream will be displayed on the live stream page, as well as on the page listing a channel's videos.

And much more!

As always, the new version brings many other features and redesigns, in addition to the new features described above. Among them:

• The playlist management page has been redesigned to make it easier to use. It is also possible to choose the order in which playlists are displayed publicly within a channel.
• Admins can now configure the default values for the "Licence", "Visibility" and "Comment Policy" fields when publishing a video.
• Users can list active login sessions and revoke them if necessary.

You can find details of all the changes at https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/releases/tag/v7.3.0.

Feel free to share this information and suggest ideas. If you can, please make a donation to Framasoft, the non-profit organisation that develops PeerTube.

Framasoft.

Thanks to your support, we achieved all three of our fundraising goals for developing features in the PeerTube application!
We now have the necessary resources to work on it during the year!

Throughout the campaign, your enthusiasm has truly warmed our hearts. We would like to thank everyone who contributed to its success, from those who talked about the campaign on social media, to the various news outlets that relayed the information to their audiences and the hundreds of people who made a donation!

Furthermore, through this crowdfunding campaign, we aimed to introduce PeerTube and Framasoft to individuals who may not be familiar with them, particularly in the English-speaking world. Thanks to your many voices and your help, we've succeeded!

You really are wonderful... thank you! ❤️

How your donations will help

Here is an overview of the features we'll be able to develop, thanks to you:

• Free PeerTube "Premium" enhancements for everyone, which allow you to play your video in background, download it, change its resolution, etc.
• Adding a video manager to the application, enabling you to publish your videos directly from your smartphone!
• The ability to broadcast lives via the app!

We also had a fourth, slightly more "meta" objective: to support Framasoft.

We saw this objective as a bit of a bonus, which would of course help the PeerTube project, but whose main aim was to make Framasoft and its actions more visible. Emphasize that PeerTube is not just a technical project, but part of a broader vision that we have at Framasoft.
The vision of a digital environment that empowers everyone.

Despite the fact that this "meta" aspect didn't seem directly related to PeerTube, you supported us in achieving it... and what a support it was!

On behalf of the entire Framasoft team, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you!

In a nutshell

During the three weeks of the campaign, the PeerTube project continued to live on via:

• Our participation in Fireside Fedi show
• The release of the v7.2 of the software, including major enhancements in the way to identify sensitive content.
• More recently, v7.2.1 was released, which fixed some issues and integrated new translations.
• Our participation in two AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Lemmy and Reddit. These were high points for us and we were thrilled to be able to answer to questions we'd rarely been asked!
• The publication of two articles in which we shared our experience developing the mobile app. Part 1 - Part 2

And now?

The rest of this year's adventure is fully planned.

For the mobile app, we'll be spending the rest of the year developing features you've enabled us to fund! While some of these will arrive fairly quickly, others, such as live broadcasts, are unlikely to be released before the end of the year or early next year.

On the PeerTube software side, we've already published the roadmap for 2025.
Many improvements are planned for the coming months!

To stay informed about developments and improvements to the PeerTube project, follow us on social media (Mastodon, Bluesky and other platforms) or subscribe to our newsletter.

Finally, we count on you to promote the PeerTube project, install the mobile app, and ensure that more people discover spaces where they can control their digital lives, including posting videos.

Thank you all for following us in this campaign, and thank you again for supporting us during it!
Without you, PeerTube would never have been possible. Thanks to you, we'll put PeerTube in everyone's pocket!

The Framasoft team

Thanks to this completed goal, we will be able to work with peace of mind on every improvements we wanted to make to the application this year! 🎉

📹 Broadcast live streams using PeerTube app

Whether you want to cover an event happening in your street or to share your road trip with your community, you will soon be able to do so directly from the mobile app!

In addition to making broadcasting easier (no more need for computer or OBS), this enhancement will let you be more spontaneous: you will soon be able to start your live streams on the fly, in just a few seconds...! 🥳

For those of you who have been following the PeerTube project for a long time, maybe you remember we have already funded an app dedicated to PeerTube live streams, soberly called PeerTube Live.
At the time, we called on an external developer to work on this app: we never thought that one day we would maintain our own mobile app!
Today, we can't imagine not integrating this major feature for videomakers into our app. Fortunately, we will be able to draw on the previous work to implement it, even if that will still be a lot of work!

🫶 Next goal: Support Framasoft

We can imagine many of you have questions about this goal.

If you didn't know, PeerTube is developed by a small french non-profit called Framasoft (yeah, this is us!).
Our mission is to raise awareness about digital issues and cultural commons: to help people all around the world (even if we mostly work in France) to have a critical look on our digital society by sharing keys to understanding.

However, we define ourselves as being an organization "that does". We like to think but above all we seek to build solutions that enable everyone to take ownership on these issues and become emancipated.

That is why we built PeerTube: to allow everyone to get back control on their videos.

That is also why we have been running the "De-google-ify" campaign for the past 11 years, providing alternative services to those offered by Big Tech. These services, which are free and accessible to all, are among the largest non-commercial services in the world!

Finally, we opened Framaspace for the same reason: to provide a free collaborative space (based on Nextcloud) for small non-profits and collectives.

We seek to equip those who wish to build a fairer and more equitable world.

Of course, even though all of our services are free, they still have a cost. We have to pay each month for our 10 employees and the whole infrastructure we maintain.
To do so, our business model is based on solidarity: that's donations from thousands of people (mostly based in France) that fund us! That's thanks to all these people that PeerTube was born, that 2,000 collectives can enjoy Framaspace today or that more than 2,000,000 of people can freely use our services each month!

By supporting Framasoft, you support both PeerTube and all our other projects.
By doing so, you allow us to help to (digitally) empower those working for a better world.

To support Framasoft and help us to continue to act, you can:

• Follow our social media and share our posts: Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit & Lemmy
• Subscribe to our newsletter and share the latest PeerTube news!
• Share the crowdfunding campaign with your friends and family or on your social medias
• And indeed, if you can so, support us by making a donation!
  Thank you very much! 💖

Support PeerTube

Publishing a video streaming application from the Fediverse on various application stores was like navigating an obstacle course.

Due to the stores' sometimes very strict policies and the sensitivity surrounding video content — particularly that generated or broadcast by third parties — we had to exercise extreme caution. Apple and Google consider us, as the application's publisher, responsible for all content accessed via the application. They are particularly strict on this issue with regard to video formats, much more so than with podcast applications or web browsers.
Here's an overview of the various stages, from the initial submission to the production launch.

Precautions taken

To maximise our chances of being accepted by the stores, we took several precautions right from the start.

Filtering accessible platforms

The first measure was to restrict access to the platforms via a filtering system using identifiers specific to each store. This identifier is used to maintain an allowlist of trusted platforms adapted to each store.

• On the Play Store (Android), only a restricted allowlist of platforms is accessible to meet Google's requirements.
• On the App Store (iOS), the allowlist is even more limited, with Apple imposing particularly stringent validation criteria.
• On F-Droid, however, all platforms listed in our moderated index are accessible without additional filtering.

The advantage of this tag-based system is that it is entirely deported server-side. In other words, if we need to remove a problematic platform or add a new one, this can be done without updating the application itself. This gives us great flexibility and responsiveness when the need arises.

No manual addition of platforms at the start

To ensure the first submission was validated quickly, we deliberately disabled the option to manually add a platform in the application. Consequently, only the platforms authorized by our filter, of which there were very few, were available.

Once the application had been validated and was available on the Play Store, we re-enabled manual addition of platforms on the Android side, watching carefully to see if it caused any problems. After several months with no negative feedback, we opened this possibility on iOS as well.

Presentation and deployment strategy

To give ourselves the best possible chance of success, we paid particular attention to the user interface and the store listings (thumbnails, descriptions, keywords, screenshots, etc.). This is because the stores also pay close attention to appearance, perceived quality, and adherence to good UX/UI practices.

We decided to take a step-by-step approach:

1. First the Play Store, which is faster and more flexible.
2. Then the App Store, which is more demanding but unavoidable.
3. Finally, F-Droid, which requires a different approach and is essential for FOSS users.

Google Play Store: smooth validation

The official Flutter documentation was followed for publication on the Google Play Store:
https://docs.flutter.dev/deployment/android.

The Play Store allows several deployment types, which are useful for testing different stages of the application:

• Internal testing: This allows you to distribute the app to a small group of internal testers (up to 100).
• Closed testing: Allows you to target a larger select group via an email address list or Google group.
• Open testing: Allows any user to join the testing programme via a public link.
• Production: This is the stable version published on the Play Store for all users.

Validation steps

Each deployment type is automatically validated by Google with very short turnaround times.

• Internal and closed tests are generally available within an hour.
• Open tests and production releases can take a few hours, but rarely more.

Google has always accepted the application upon initial submission, without requesting changes or asking questions. There have been no exchanges or feedback from them, just validation after submission and a well-written changelog.
It seems that the precautions we took beforehand were sufficient, or even that we could have been more relaxed!

Apple App Store: complications...

Once I had successfully navigated the Google process, it was time to move on to Apple, which is known for being significantly more demanding.

As with Android, I followed the official Flutter documentation for iOS deployment.
[Flutter iOS Deployment] (https://docs.flutter.dev/deployment/ios).

On iOS, apps can be distributed through two main channels:

• TestFlight: for sharing beta versions with up to 10,000 testers. This process is more flexible than the production process, but is still subject to validation.
• Production: the stable, public version of the app, visible on the App Store.

The validation steps

Gabe's warning

Before submitting PeerTube to iOS, we consulted Gabe, the developer behind the OwnCast project, who had previously been rejected several times by Apple. He shared his valuable feedback and strategies for complying with the App Store Guidelines. Here is a summary:

• Guideline 1.2 – Security – User-generated content
  ➤ Solution: Integrate a client-side “reporting” system that sends an email to a moderator who can remove an instance if necessary.

• Guideline 5.2.3 – Legal aspects

  Your app contains content or features that may violate the rights of one or more third parties. Specifically, your app provides potentially unauthorized access to third-party audio or video streaming, catalogs, and discovery services.

➤ Solution: Provide a PDF document listing each video server preconfigured in the app, with “Authorized” marked for each one. Apple is not satisfied with a simple statement: they want tangible proof.

• Guideline 3.1.1 – Commercial Activity – Payments – In-App Purchases
  ➤ Problem: The app allowed donations via links such as PayPal, OpenCollective, KoFi, etc.
  ➤ Solution: Remove all payment-related interactions from the app. All links to donations must open a page in an external browser (Safari, Chrome, etc.). No payment links should be displayed in an internal WebView.

• Guideline 5.2.3 – Legal (bis)
  ➤ Solution: Provide as much documentation, links, and evidence as possible that the integrated catalogs and discovery services are operated by us and not by an unauthorized third party.

Thanks again to Gabe for his valuable advice!

We got started and hit a snag.

Despite rigorously following Gabe's advice, Apple didn't cut us any slack.

Of the two apps we were trying to publish at the end of 2024 — Lokas and PeerTube — we received eight rejections for Lokas before getting approval and three for PeerTube.

As soon as an Apple reviewer found an issue, even a minor one, the request was rejected and we had to correct it before moving on to the next step.

Here are the main guidelines that caused us problems:

Guideline 5.2.3 - Legal

Your app contains content or features that may violate the rights of one or more third parties. Specifically, your app provides potentially unauthorized access to third-party audio or video streaming, catalogs, and discovery services.

Despite providing Apple with a document listing the authorised platforms in the iOS app, this was not enough to convince them. We therefore replied:

The platforms listed in the PeerTube application have granted the right to list and access their video content to the PeerTube application.
These authorizations are listed in the document "Authorized Platforms for PeerTube App".

Can you explain what kind of evidence we need to provide to show that we have the right to access this content?

The document attached was exactly the same as the one submitted when the application was filed.

Guideline 3.1.1 - Business - Payments - In-App Purchase

Apple reported a link to the website joinpeertube.org in the app, which contains a donation button. This simple external link was enough to justify rejection.

In our initial response, we explained that all donation links now open an external page in the browser and that no collection is made within the app itself. We emphasised that this approach complied with the App Store guidelines since the donation process was completely separate from the app's functionality. Despite this clarification, Apple was not convinced.

Looking back at the App Store Guidelines, I found a paragraph in our favour:

Section 3.2.2 (iv) : Apps that are not approved nonprofits or otherwise permitted under Section 3.2.1 (vi) may collect charitable donations outside of the app, such as via Safari or SMS.

I therefore sent another message to the validation team, reiterating that the app does not collect any donations internally and that all support links open an external page in Safari, in accordance with Section 3.2.2 (iv) of the App Store Guidelines, which permits this for non-charitable apps. I therefore requested a reassessment of the decision or clarification of any other issues.

🎉 Result: The PeerTube app has been officially released on iOS!

Since then, I have submitted six updates to PeerTube, all of which have been approved without issue — including the one that introduced the login feature.

Each update was approved within a few hours — at most, within 24 hours.
The App Store is never easy, but with patience and careful reading of the guidelines, it works.

F-Droid: another adventure

Once the Apple stage was complete, I moved on to submitting to F-Droid.
Here, the problem wasn't with the guidelines, but with the process.

The official documentation is rather sparse and I struggled to find a comprehensive resource for a Flutter project. So I relied on:

• the 'Quick Start' documentation: https://f-droid.org/docs/Submitting_to_F-Droid_Quick_Start_Guide/
• the developer FAQ: https://f-droid.org/docs/FAQ_App_Developers.html
• and, above all, analysis of other Flutter apps already on F-Droid.

Adapting to how F-Droid work

F-Droid has specific requirements:

• The build must be reproducible and completely free.
• All external dependencies must be verifiable or removable.
• Any anti-features, i.e. limitations that do not correspond to the ideals of free software, must be declared.

Example: TetheredNet

The PeerTube application uses two Framasoft-maintained services by default:

• instances.joinpeertube.org to list available instances
• SepiaSearch to search from a local account.

As these services are not configurable by the user, this was considered an 'anti-feature' of the TetheredNet type (i.e. connection to a centralised service without the possibility of changing it).

This anti-feature was therefore added during the initial submission.

The good news is that since then, this anti-feature has been removed, as we have made these services customisable in the app.

Overcoming the blockage caused by an obsolete dependency

Before reaching validation, we encountered an obstacle related to a dependency that was used to manage the local database. Although this library was popular when the initial choice was made, it is no longer maintained and does not offer a version compatible with the latest Flutter version required by F-Droid to guarantee build reproducibility. This prevented the application from being compiled on the F-Droid infrastructure and made publication impossible.

Following an analysis, we concluded that the most sustainable and secure solution was to replace the obsolete dependency with a maintained alternative that met F-Droid's requirements. Although this required a partial rewrite of the local data management, it unblocked the situation and ensured the long-term stability of the project.

The merge request submission

After several iterations, we were finally able to submit our app to F-Droid.
You can view the merge request (MR) here:
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/17235

You can also view the final configuration of the PeerTube app on F-Droid (file metadata/*.yml):
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/blob/master/metadata/org.framasoft.peertube.yml

Using F-Droid requires patience and rigor, but it also provides a better understanding of the challenges of free software and decentralisation.

Ultimately, this experience reminds us that making an application available online is a skill in its own right. This skill is often overlooked, yet it is nevertheless essential and requires time, rigor and a variety of skills.

We are therefore particularly happy and proud to offer PeerTube on the major app stores and make this project accessible to as many people as possible.

Finally, don't forget that crowdfunding for the development of the PeerTube app is still ongoing until 17 June 2025!

Why flutter?

When it comes to developing mobile applications, the question of which technologies to use quickly arises: should we create a separate application for each platform, or adopt an approach that allows us to pool our efforts? This is where cross-platform development comes in: a method that involves creating a single code base for several operating systems, primarily Android and iOS.

Cross-platform development offers many advantages. First and foremost, it considerably reduces costs and maintenance efforts since only one code base is required, limiting the need for bug fixes and multiple updates. It also enables faster and wider deployment, reaching a broader audience without the need to develop separate applications.

As our developer was not initially specialized in mobile development, he had to train himself to master the necessary tools. Two main technologies emerged: React Native and Flutter.

We therefore conducted a comparative study to select the solution best suited to our needs. After analysis, we chose Flutter. You can consult the complete study for more details by following this link: https://framagit.org/wicklow/peertube-prototypes

After making this decision, our developer set about learning and mastering Flutter. He shares his experience in the rest of this article.

Learn Dart and Flutter

The first step was to understand how Flutter works. Flutter applications are written in Dart, an object-oriented programming language. I started by exploring the official Dart and Flutter documentation to grasp the fundamentals.

Here are the different resources I used to get started:

• The official Flutter documentation: An excellent official introduction to understanding the fundamental concepts of Flutter.
• Flutteris blog: Detailed articles and practical tutorials to deepen my knowledge.
• Code with Andrea: Guides and practical examples to help me structure and optimize my Flutter projects.

Choosing your architecture

Once I had established the fundamentals, I turned my attention to the ideal structure for the project. After exploring various approaches, I opted for a 'feature-first' architecture. This method involves organising code by functionality rather than by file type, such as models, views, or controllers.

The 'Feature First' approach offers several advantages. It brings greater clarity to the project by isolating each feature in its own folder, which makes the structure of the code easier to navigate and understand. Additionally, this method promotes modularity by making features independent, enabling them to be reused or modified without impacting other parts of the project. Finally, in the context of an open-source project, this organisation makes it easier for external developers to contribute, as they can focus on specific functionalities without interfering with the rest of the code.

Choosing dependencies

Each library integrated into the project must be reviewed to ensure that it meets the project's functional requirements, can be maintained over the long term, and does not introduce technical risks.
As Flutter is still a relatively new technology, caution should be exercised when selecting dependencies. Some libraries may lack maturity or community support, which could lead to bugs or issues with future updates.

The following are some general criteria for choosing a dependency on pub.dev:

• Check the number of people actively contributing to the project on GitHub. A larger team of contributors often indicates a more robust project in the long term.
• Ensure the project is active with recent commits and regular pull requests, ideally from different users.
• Look at the overall score on pub.dev, which measures package quality.
• Check the frequency of publications.
• Give preference to packages published by a verified publisher.

Selected dependencies

Taking these criteria into account, I carefully selected the libraries needed to develop the PeerTube mobile application.

The main libraries chosen for the project are listed below, along with the reasons for their selection.

The state manager

A state manager is a tool used to manage the state of an application. In the context of Flutter, state refers to dynamic data or information that can change during application execution, such as user input, data retrieved from an API, or the state of an animation.

There are several approaches and libraries are available for state management in Flutter applications, each with its own advantages and limitations.

State management approaches

• StatefulWidget: The simplest built-in mechanism for managing local state.
• InheritedWidget: A native solution for sharing state between widgets.
• Global variables: An approach where state is stored in global variables that can be accessed throughout the application.

Popular libraries

Provider:

• Pros: Simple, lightweight and widely used by the Flutter community.
• Cons: Requires standard code and lacks advanced features.

Bloc:

• Pros: Highly structured, promotes separation of concerns and is ideal for managing complex application logic.
• Cons: Steep learning curve. Requires more code base than other solutions.

Riverpod:

• Pros: A modern alternative to Provider with a simpler API, better testability and support for dependency injection. It removes Flutter's widget tree constraints, making it more flexible.
• Cons: It is a more recent library, but development is very active.

Riverpod was chosen for its simplicity, flexibility, and scalability, and it offers global state management that is independent of the widget tree.
I like Riverpod's global variable approach. In addition, integrating code generation into the project promises to improve performance in the future. However, it's important to choose a solution that matches your preferences and specific needs.

The router

A router is an essential component that manages navigation between the various screens of an application. It allows routes to be defined and transitions to be managed, and it supports deep links and the transmission of parameters via URLs.

Several libraries are available to manage navigation in Flutter applications:

• Navigator: Included in the Flutter SDK but lacks features such as deep links.
• AutoRoute: Generates code to simplify route management, but can be difficult to configure.
• GoRouter: An official library supported by the Flutter team, combining ease of use with advanced deep-linking support.

After analysis, GoRouter proved to be the best choice for this project, particularly because of:

• active support from the Flutter team and comprehensive documentation, guaranteeing a reliable long-term solution.
• Deep link support, which is essential for redirecting users between PeerTube platform web pages and the application.
• It is based on the Navigator 2.0 API included in the Flutter SDK.

The video player

The video player is an essential component of the PeerTube application, forming the heart of the user experience. From the very start, it was crucial for us to make the right choice of library to ensure smooth playback, compatibility with different video formats, and seamless integration with the application's functionality.

Several libraries are available that are used by the Flutter community to implement video playback functionality.

• video_player: An official library supported by the Flutter team that provides basic video playback functionality but requires extensive customisation for advanced features.
• Chewie: Is a powerful overlay for video_player, supported by the Flutter community, which provides a pre-built, highly customisable player interface and supports basic controls such as play/pause, full-screen mode, and subtitles.
• BetterPlayer: Is an advanced video player built on top of Chewie with additional functionality, but it is not very well maintained.
• MediaKit: Is a newer package that aims to provide a consistent, feature-rich video playback experience across all platforms. However, its ecosystem and community support are still developing.

Following our analysis, Chewie emerged as our top choice thanks to its balance of simplicity and functionality.

• It is easy to integrate and provides a ready-to-use player interface with minimal configuration.
• It is also customizable, allowing developers to adapt the user interface and behavior to the needs of the application.
• It is maintained by the Flutter community, which guarantees reliability.

However, after several months of use, we found that Chewie's maintenance was weaker than expected. Some features and bug fixes contained in merge requests were not being integrated, which limited our ability to respond quickly to the application's needs.

Consequently, we decided to migrate to video_player. Although implementing a customized user interface and advanced functionality takes more time with this library, it offers more granular control and greater stability. This transition has enabled us to design a customised user experience while guaranteeing greater long-term reliability.

Flavors

We needed two distinct applications:

• stable: The production version intended for deployment in public stores.
• nightly: The version incorporating the latest changes, based on the development branch.

Flavors make it possible to manage these two versions separately by creating two applications. To set this up, you need to configure Flavors on each targeted native platform (Android and iOS). Additionally, each application must be signed separately for each flavour. Finally, the Dart code shared by all platforms can be configured according to the environment using the --dart-define-from-file argument, which provides a .env file containing the necessary variables.

The example command for building the stable environment is:

flutter build apk --flavor stable --dart-define-from-file=env-stable.json

For more details on configuring flavours and signing applications, see this report, which details how we set up the flavour system.

Mistakes made

Writing tests too early

One mistake I made at the start of the project was trying to write unit and integration tests too early in the development process. While tests are crucial for ensuring code quality and stability, writing them prematurely can be counterproductive, particularly when the application's architecture and functionality are still in the process of being defined. Indeed, many changes were made to the code structure and functionalities at the start of the project, quickly rendering the tests obsolete.

From this experience, I learned that the stability of the architecture must be prioritised. Before writing tests, it is crucial to ensure that the application architecture is well defined and stable. This reduces the need for frequent test modifications.

Underestimating the complexity of dependencies

Initially, we integrated several libraries without fully assessing their maturity and compatibility with our project. Some of these dependencies turned out to be unstable or poorly maintained, which led to unforeseen problems and delays. A more thorough dependency analysis would have prevented these issues.

This Flutter learning path has enabled me to lay a solid foundation for developing the PeerTube mobile application.
In the next article, we will look at a crucial stage: publishing the application on the stores (Google Play, the App Store, and F-Droid). We'll detail the necessary steps, best practices, and potential pitfalls to help you successfully launch a mobile application like PeerTube.

We would like to take this opportunity to remind you that you can participate to the crowdfunding campaign for the development of the PeerTube application until 17 June 2025!

So... the second collective goal has been achieved! 🎉

🎬 Manage your videos from anywhere

Videomakers can be happy! Thanks to your support, we will develop an interface to manage your videos directly from the app!

You will soon be able to publish your videos from anywhere! No more need for your computer or to use the web interface!
Yeah, okay, anywhere at the condition you have a working connection, that's right... 🙃

The video management interface will be as complete as possible. It will let you integrate subtitles into your videos, define their chapters and edit their metadata.

But that's not all! You will also be able to find statistics about your videos directly from the app, allowing you to track the evolution in popularity of your videos!

Finally, we will integrate notifications concerning your publication actions. They will let you know, for example, when video upload has finished.

📹 Get ready for the live stream

We believed that this second goal was important for videomakers contributing to PeerTube.
Your contributions have shown you share this belief and we are infinitely grateful to you for showing it to us!

We're halfway there now! Thank you very much! 💖

But the journey continues! We still have two more goals to reach in this adventure and we hope you'll follow us all the way!

The next step is to unlock the ability to broadcast lives via the app!

Imagine broadcasting live on your PeerTube channel: your loved ones' wedding for those who couldn't attend; the Orphan Socks Festival; or your stroll through the next Free Software meeting. And all without any complicated technical setup, using only your phone!

We can't wait to see PeerTube live streams grow in popularity as you share your vlogs or films of events that drive you!

To help us to reach this next collective goal, you can:

• Follow our social media and share our posts: Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit & Lemmy
• Subscribe to our newsletter and share the latest PeerTube news!
• Share the crowdfunding campaign with your friends and family or on your social medias
• And indeed, if you can so, support us by making a donation!

We rely on you!

Support PeerTube

Video management redesign

Thanks to the work done by our design provider team La Coopérative des Internets, PeerTube has become clearer. This time, they designed a new video management interface that we've integrated!
You can now:

• Navigate between your videos using the clearer pagination system which is more efficient than previous version's infinite scroll
• Choose columns to display like, as example: "channels", "duration", "name", "views", "publication date" or if there are comments or not
• Choose to display videos from a particular channel (or several) using specific buttons
• Filter videos depending on their visibility, whether they are lives or not, if they are password protected, if they are VOD… also, a work on the search have been done!

Redesign of the video update page

Another page has been given a makeover: the one of the publication and update of a live or a video! This module has been divided and reorganized in navigable sections via a new side sub-menu.
The Studio and the statistics pages have also been included in this new sub-menu, which brings together everything to do with managing videos. The non-available features are clearly displayed and a help button explains why they can be unavailable (disabled by the admin, unavailable because the video is being encoded, etc.)

A horizontal banner makes it easy to undo or save changes, or to go to the video's public page. It can also display additional information, such as whether if the video is waiting encoding.

Finally, the page to replace a video has been redesigned, and you can now use the "Drag'n'Drop" feature to upload a new version of your video.

Hiding is nice, explain why is better

Having studied existing systems on major platforms (social media, video, music, etc.) as well as Fediverse software, La Coopérative des Internets helped us to get a better understanding of improvements to develop in PeerTube's system for hiding sensitive content.

The very notion of "sensitive content" varies a lot from one person to another, from one culture to another, and an overly binary system could put people off viewing a video because of this vagueness. What is obvious to you may not be obvious to everyone. That's why it's now possible for video makers to give a reason about why they judged their video deserved a warning message (a similar system than the "content warning" of Mastodon, for example). People who want to watch this video will be in a better position to know if they really want to see it or pass by.

We also took the opportunity to review the viewer settings for managing sensitive videos:

• Display: list without being warned about sensitive videos
• Warn: list but display a warning below the thumbnail and in the video player
• Blur: list but display a warning below the thumbnail and in the video player and blur the thumbnail
• Hide: do not list at all

If enabled by the platform admin, it's also possible to apply rules according to predefined tags chosen by the video maker. For example, hide sensitive videos in general, but choose to display videos marked as violent by the video maker with a warning.

But also…

Every new version comes with its share of less visual but equally useful improvements and bug fixes! You'll find the full list for this version in its changelog.

To help us to continue to improve PeerTube, you can share this news release, suggest ideas for improvement and, if you can afford it, make a donation to Framasoft, the non-profit association that develops PeerTube.

And, last but not least, we're currently in the midst of a crowdfunding campaign! The aim is to help finance the development of major improvements for the PeerTube mobile app.
Find out how we intend to get PeerTube in everyone's pockets on the campaign website!

Thank you in advance for your support!

Framasoft

On the behalf of the whole team, thank you a thousand times!

This goal is a very important first step to allow PeerTube to reach a wider adoption! Indeed, this goal was focused on enhancing the user experience and unlocking a YouTube Premium-like experience... but free and available to everyone!

Here are the details of what your donations will make possible this year.

📱Play your videos in the background

That's common use to have to move the video in background. Whether you want to read the rest of a recipe or simply because you only need the audio because you're just listening to a podcast, it can be frustrating to have your video paused each time you leave the app or when you turn off your screen.

To solve that, we will develop an update that will allow you to play your video in the background.
And, unlike some other apps (You know who we mean... 😏), this feature will be free for everyone, thanks to your surge of solidarity! 🫶

🔔 Be notified of new content

Thanks to the notifications we will add to the app, you will be able to be notified when your favorite videomakers publish new videos!
These notifications will be able to occur even if you didn't start the app.

Of course, we will add a dedicated area to the app to manage these notifications, allowing you to customize their behavior.

⚙️ Change your videos resolution

For now, the app doesn't let you change the video resolution. However, this feature helps to enjoy a better experience, especially on mobile devices where connections could be unstable!

So, we will add the ability to choose the video resolution as well as an "auto" mode that automatically switches to the most suitable resolution regarding your connection, following what is already available in the Web version!

📺 Cast your videos to your TV!

Very popular on social medias and on our platform dedicated to feedback, we are really happy to announce that we will add support for casting your videos to your TV, using Chromecast! Apple devices will follow as soon as possible.

We already imagine fun times you will be able to share with your friends thanks to this enhancement!

💖 You are amazing!

Adding to all major features listed above, we will continue to enhance the interface and to fix different issues you report!

All these improvements are possible thanks to your support and the spirit of solidarity you have shown us!
Thank you very much for letting us reach this first goal! 🥰

However, the crowdfunding has just started and we hope that even more of you will support us in reaching our next goal: Manage your videos directly from the app!

To help us to reach this next collective goal, you can:

• Follow our social media and share our posts: Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit & Lemmy
• Subscribe to our newsletter and share the latest PeerTube news!
• Share the crowdfunding campaign with your friends and family or on your social medias
• And indeed, if you can so, support us by making a donation!

Thank you and see you very soon for the next blog post!👋

Support PeerTube

Of course, we've still a lot to do, and if the PeerTube community is growing by the day, we can already see some crucial steps that would help PeerTube to reach a wider audience!

With your help, let's put PeerTube in everyone's pocket!

Support PeerTube

An application for everyone!

Last year marked an important milestone for PeerTube. Indeed, we hired Wicklow to work on the PeerTube mobile app, which doubled our workforce dedicated to the PeerTube development.
Yes, that may sound a bit crazy, but PeerTube has so far only been developed by one single employee and a handful of volunteer contributors! (Many thanks to you! 💖)

We've been thinking about building our own mobile app for a long time, noting the massive use of smartphones to enjoy video content. Thanks to your votes on our feedback platform for PeerTube, we were convinced to get started on this project, and now we want to put some resources into it!

Since its preliminary release at the end of the last year, the app has evolved a lot and you were able to discover, some weeks ago, its first major version! Details of the improvements introduced by this version can be found in the dedicated blog post.

A bubble of autonomy outside of the YouTube-Twitch-Vimeo system

More than a mobile app, PeerTube is a vibrant ecosystem: 1,300 platforms listed, with 300,000 user accounts and 756,000 videos.
In addition to many other improvements, version 7 introduced a new design, thought to be more modern, accessible, and better suited for institutions.
Among these institutions are the French Ministry of National Education and the GARR (the IT network of Italian universities).

For all these reasons, we consider PeerTube to be a mature piece of software.

(even if, yes, there are always ways to improve it and we'll work this way! 😛)

We see in PeerTube as an emancipatory software, allowing a non-commercial sharing of videos.
Whether you wish to share your videos with your students, publish your tutorials about easy gardening or to have an autonomous video platform for your organization, everything is possible with PeerTube!

Let's popularize videos and live streams shared by humans, for humans!

To give even more people access to PeerTube, we're delighted to announce the launch of a crowdfunding campaign! 🎉

Our roadmap for PeerTube being already funded, we want to focus on improving the mobile app. We'd like to add some key features that make it easier to add content.

Together, let's get a step further and get PeerTube in everyone's pocket!

Four collective goals

PeerTube was thought as a Common, a tool that can be used by everyone. That's why we've come up with four key objectives to support the development of the mobile app.

Unlike most participatory funding, we don't offer any "rewards" for your contributions. By supporting PeerTube, your reward is to have contributed to a Common, which serves everyone and belongs to everyone.

However, we played around with the concept, and are offering you different possible "contributions", to show you the work that your support enables us to do.

€15,000 - Free PeerTube "Premium" for the people

This goal unlocks "PeerTube Premium"... but free and for everyone!

• Play video in background so you can continue to listen to a lecture or lesson without interruption, even if you need to take a quick look at a document
• Cast videos to your TV and show your friend the video tutorial super-useful for your association
• Be notified of the latest videos from your subscriptions so you never miss a release from your favorite videomaker
• Change the video definition and save on your data rate

All without ads! The magic of an application designed to serve you, not track you! 🪄

€35,000 - Share videos from your pocket

Sometimes, you don't have any major editing to do on your videos and just want to upload them quickly without using your computer.
That's what this goal will let you do!

• Manage all your channels from your account, directly from the app
• Edit chapters, subtitles and other information about your videos
• View detailed stats on your content: how many people watch your videos, for how long, from where, etc.
• Upload new videos from your smartphone

Should the app answer to videomakers needs...? That's up to you to tell us, because we're looking forward developing these features by the end of the year.

€55,000 - Livestream from your mobile

So you can broadcast a social movement or your discovery of Seoul live!

• Configure and manage your livestreams from your phone, without OBS! 😎
• Use your device and its data, no additional equipment required
• Broadcast your lives right in your hands, without needing a computer
• No more need for a secondary mobile app dedicated to live streams - all your needs in one place!

We can already imagine live broadcasts shared from demonstrations, conferences, and community debates. However, even if this goal is funded, we don't think we can finish it before the end of the year, and are counting on a release in 2026.

€75,000 - Support Framasoft & PeerTube

PeerTube is a major project in the history of Framasoft, but it is not the only one. If Framasoft was able to develop PeerTube, that's because our association has been supported for its other actions by donations.

By supporting Framasoft, you're helping to build a digital world that is inclusive, emancipatory and non-commercial.

• We do not make a profit: we provide Commons
• All donations fund all our projects, both PeerTube and dozens of others
• We maintain PeerTube, with a free and qualitative support: this daily, behind-the-scenes work is done in addition to new developments
• We de-google-ify more than 2M people each month, by providing web services enabling them to emancipate themselves from Big Tech.

We'll detail all of these goals in dedicated blog posts very soon! Stay tuned!

Contribute to commons: a virtuous circle!

By contributing, you donate not only to the PeerTube mobile app, but also to all Framasoft's projects!
Here is a graph showing, in detail, how we use this money. If you would like more details, you can also consult our financial report (in french).

This crowdfunding campaign is really important for us because not only does it allow us to secure the money we need to develop the project, it also allows us to gauge public enthusiasm for the mobile application and the PeerTube project in general!

But let's be clear! We will implement the improvements proposed in this crowdfunding campaign, regardless of whether we achieve our objectives!
If we don't meet our fundraising goals, we will have to dip into the donations made by the French-speaking community at the end of last year for all of Framasoft's projects. This will show us that our enthusiasm for PeerTube and its application isn't shared. (That happens sometimes! 🤷‍♀️)
We'll then ask ourselves whether we really need to add video uploading (or live streaming) to the app, and above all whether we should ease up on our strategy to popularize the PeerTube ecosystem.

Your support is our compass: it's up to you to tell us if you share our enthusiasm!

Support PeerTube

Support the PeerTube ecosystem by sharing your attention...

The PeerTube ecosystem extends beyond Framasoft. Month after month, more and more people and organizations are adopting the project and bringing it to life!

Thanks to its powerful extensions system, volunteer developers are constantly expanding software's functionalities. The PeerTube extension catalogue includes over 200 extensions, each of which can be used to add new features to PeerTube or change its appearance!

In the community, there are a number of inspiring initiatives!
Take the Mastodon Fedi.Video account, for example, which had helped to make PeerTube videomakers more visible for years!

Also, specialized platforms are springing up, like MakerTube, dedicated to those who "make".

Obviously, we can't list all the great initiatives we've spotted in this article, but a kudos to you all for your fantastic work. Thank you for enriching PeerTube with your colors! 🫶

If you'd like to know more about the PeerTube ecosystem, you can sign up for the PeerTube newsletter. We'll keep you up to date with the latest news about the project and community initiatives!

You can also follow the PeerTube account on our social media accounts:

• PeerTube on Mastodon
• PeerTube on BlueSky

In addition to occasional news updates, we publish weekly tips on how to use PeerTube!

Finally, you'll be able to ask us anything during next AMAs (Ask Me Anything) organized on Lemmy and Reddit:

• This Wednesday, May 28 at 5p.m., on the Open Source Lemmy community.
• During the week of 08 June, on the Open Source sub-reddit. The precise date will be shared later.

...and helping us raise the money!

We're giving ourselves 3 weeks to collectively fund our actions to popularize PeerTube.

We sincerely believe that we can do it, because we're convinced PeerTube is a Common that's as important to you as it is to us!

So if you would also like to see a world where PeerTube is used by everyone, support us by making a donation (if you can) and spreading the word about the campaign!

Together, let's take back the video platforms!

Support PeerTube

Log on your PeerTube account

This version allows you to connect to an existing PeerTube account (in addition to the local account, linked to your device). Even better, you can connect to multiple accounts! Then, it's up to you to choose the default account.

You'll access your subscriptions, playlists, viewing history, etc. right into your application!

Comment from your pocket

Whether you want to thank the person who showed you how to make a speculoos cake, or tell them that it tastes even better with less sugar, you can comment directly from the app! And if you're not happy with your comment, just delete it.

Manage channel subscriptions

Did you like a channel highlighted in the PeerTube ecosystem newsletter? Subscribe to it from the app!

Are you no longer interested in this channel specialising in speculoos-based recipes? Unsubscribe now!

And of course you can manage your subscriptions directly from the app.

Playlist management

Spotted several videos while waiting for a friend? Want to combine clips from several PeerTube videos? Add them to one of your playlists before you put your phone back in your pocket!

You'll be able to watch, edit, create new playlists and even delete them as you wish, all from your phone. And if you're logged on your account, you'll be able to see these changes on your computer, in the web version of PeerTube!

But also...

• Don't know what to say in the comments to let creators know you like their content? Don't worry: you can also give a thumbs up from the app (or thumbs down: we don't hide those, on PeerTube);
• When you log on an existing PeerTube account, you can be extra secure with two-factor authentication;
• Enjoyed a video you recently watched but can't remember its name? Find it directly in your recently watched history (that you can clear at any time);
• Find the full list of improvements on the application repository;
• A new icon appears for a this version: thanks to the always joyful work of David Revoy under a CC-BY 4.0 licence!

Coming soon...

We don't intend to stop there. The PeerTube mobile app is an excellent tool for opening up new audiences to a whole world of freely shared videos.

Here's an idea of the features we plan to develop:

• Soon (depending on your support and enthusiasm)
  * Play a video in the background
  * Next video recommendations
  * Improve the current situation of limiting the list of platforms in the application
  * Improve notifications
  * Broadcast to TVs
  * ...should we go as far as being able to upload videos and manage PeerTube channels from the app? Do you think it's worth it...?
• Later (thanks to renewed support from NGI0)
  * Adaptation to tablets
  * Adaptation to TVs (Google TV... AppleTV will depend on their limitations)
  * Offline viewing (for downloadable content)

Funded by Europe, thanks to you!

So far, Wicklow's work on this application (and the work of the mobile design and development experts who have supported him) has been funded by the NGI0 Entrust programme, with money from the European Commission, and managed by the great people at NLnet.

We can't say enough about how much this kind of programs have contributed to digital commons, giving free software communities the means to work and give everyone more digital autonomy (remember to tell your representatives, who have to decide on the future of this funding).

The success of this application (and PeerTube) depends on your support!

We're counting on you now to download (or update) the application and spread the word!

And as always, there are many ways you can help us improve PeerTube: by sharing this news, by suggesting improvements, by reporting bugs directly in the application, by translating to our platform, by helping with the code and, if you can afford it, by donating!

Thanks in advance for your support!

Framasoft

Download the lastest apk (Android/Advanced)

Already done at the beginning of the year

Before we list future improvements to PeerTube, we can already tell you what we've done at the beginning of the year.

Broadly speaking (since you can get the detailed version of what's new in version 7.1 here), you'll find the redesign of the "About" page, your PeerTube content as podcasts and improved playback comfort thanks to the update of the p2p-media-loader, the library that allows PeerTube to use P2P in the video player!

As for the released late 2024 app (available on F-droid, the Play Store and the App Store), it allows you to watch videos (pretty handy for a video-viewing app, isn't it?), have a local account so you can add videos to a "to watch later" list, explore platforms, channels and so on, all while avoiding the dark patterns of applications developed by the GAFAMs (like doom scrolling, ubiquitous notifications, etc.).

Version 0.6.0 (released end of January) now allows you to see comments under videos!

What's coming this year

Channel transfer

This year will see the arrival of a much requested feature: the ability to transfer ownership of a channel to another account! Currently, a channel is linked to the PeerTube account that created it. It will soon be possible for the account associated with the channel (or the admin of the instance) to transfer the ownership of this channel and propagate this change throughout the federation (as is already the case when changing the ownership of a video).

This feature goes hand in hand with the development of another much-requested feature: shared administration of a channel (see... below 👀).

Instance customisation

For many instance administrators, it is important to be able to customise their platform as they see fit (in their own image, in the image of the institution they represent, etc.). That's why we're working on making it easier to make changes such as the general colours of the interface, the ability to add a logo, customise the video player, allow or disallow the integration of videos according to an allowlist/blocklist, and much more... This extensive customisation of the interface will be accessible to admins directly from the PeerTube web interface.

Set-up wizard

PeerTube is designed for a wide range of audiences: institutions, non-profits, media, companies, etc. In order to simplify the configuration of a platform, we are going to develop a graphical configuration wizard that will allow, after the installation of PeerTube, to apply and display several recommended configuration rules according to the desired profile of the platform (with the installation of plugins depending on the use case: adding chat if lives are authorised, LDAP/OpenID, etc.).

Multi-user channel management

Once the work on transferring channel ownership is complete, we'll finally be able to offer the multi-user channel management! To the public, the channel will belong to a main account, but can be managed by several other users in the same instance. These co-manager accounts will have the same rights (upload videos, create and manage playlists, customise the channel, etc.) but will not be able to:

• delete the channel;
• transfer it;
• manage the list of co-managers

These changes will be accompanied by a number of design and database changes, which is a lot of work!

But also...

This year will also see an improved warning system for sensitive content and "quality of life" features for the management and moderation of instances, allowing institutions, associations, media, administrations, etc. to use PeerTube more serenely. This will be done via shared lists of instances or accounts to be banned and also via auto-tags preventing video publication that contain specific keywords. We're also planning to add batch action capabilities on videos, so you can update the licence of multiple videos in a single action, for example.

What the year holds for the mobile application

The mobile application is an excellent way to facilitate the adoption of PeerTube by a wide audience. We now want to expand the audience to also include tablet and TV users.

We'll also allow you to connect to your PeerTube account, giving you access to all your subscriptions, likes, comments, history, notifications, settings and playlists.

By the end of the year, you'll be able to play your videos in the background, stream them from your phone to your "smart" TV (initially Android; Apple TVs will take a bit more work) and receive notifications. The video player will also be improved.

For content creators, it will be possible to upload and manage your videos, start a live broadcast and manage your channels directly from the application!

PeerTube moves forward thanks to you!

It's thanks to the trust you've placed in us over the years, your financial (and/or moral) support, the help of la Coopérative des Internets and the funding of the NLnet Foundation that we can offer you this roadmap.

We hope you like it enough to continue to help us!

Both those projets benefited from external expertise (in design and mobile development ). Plus, both implied updating or even creating user documentation to facilitate adoption.

So here are the links to share those resources that show how the cuttlefish seaweed sausage is made!

Funding expertise is hard, and worth every cent

FOSS projects are underfunded, they seldom have the means to hire such talents, even though they make a world of difference.

We have been fortunate enough to get funding from the NGI0 Entrust program (thanks to great people at NLnet) to co-finance such expertise.

We have worked with La coopérative des Internets (designers), and Zenika (development expertise), who happily agree to share their reports as commons (please forgive the typos: they've been translated from French)

Sharing design and development reports

Click on the line to get:

• The UX / UI design report that inspired the v7 makeover
• The UX / UI design work to create the PeerTube mobile app
• The mobile developments report explaining strategies and tips for developing the mobile app

Obviously, those reports are deeply focused on PeerTube and its specificities. The choices, lessons, tips and the expertise shared here should not be applied as is on any other FOSS project.

That being said, the FOSS community know how sharing experience and expertise is always a win-win strategy. We sincerely hope that bringing this work in the Commons will inspire and help other projects.

People who "read the manual": we care about you!

PeerTube v7 came with a complete design remodel. Meaning that all the screenshots in our documentation became obsolete... And that we had to update changes in menus, paths, etc.

• The updated PeerTube documentation is here.
• The mobile app also needed its own user documentation, so it's right here!

Help us share and care about PeerTube!

PeerTube is maintained by Framasoft (hi! That's us!), a small French not-for-profit advocating for digital emancipation and commons. We are funded though grants and grassroots donations, have only 2 devs on PeerTube, no marketing department... but we have you!

You can help us and support PeerTube by:

• sharing this news, the joinpeertube website and our socials
• subscribing to our newsletter, our mastodon account (or even Bluesky, Insta, etc.)
• suggesting an improvement on our feedback tool
• making a donation to Framasoft.

Your help matters!
Framasoft

Redesign of ‘About’ pages

Thanks to the work of La Coopérative des Internets, the "About" pages of the platforms have been redesigned to make them even clearer and easier to access, with information such as a description of the platform, the terms of use, some key figures, the main rules in clear sentences, etc. We've had a lot of positive feedback and hope you like it too!

Better platform identification

The concept of platform federation is not always easy to explain, so why not take it one step at a time? That's what this new video component does by highlighting the address of the platform where the video is hosted. Clicking on it gives you an explanation of where the video comes from and you can get more information, such as seeing all the videos hosted on the remote platform.

Your PeerTube content as a podcast

Podcasts are a very popular way of consuming content, so it's important to make them easy to distribute. PeerTube was already compatible with Podcast 2.0, which brings new features (transcription, chaptering, etc.) to the world of podcasts. Version 7.1 improves support for Podcast 2.0, allowing users to subscribe to channels and play the video audio stream (if available) using classic podcast applications (AntennaPod, Podverse, etc.).

In addition, this new version also makes the podcast feed compatible with Apple Podcast, allowing content creators who have correctly added a banner, avatar and description to their channel to submit their podcast feed to Apple.

Revised views

The new view protocol, which increases the number of simultaneous viewers by reducing the number of messages sent to the federation, is now enabled by default. We talked about this in the stress test we ran on PeerTube in December 2023 (it's a bit technical).

Verification on Mastodon

Mastodon's micro-blogging software allows you to link your accounts to certify them. This allows you to say on your profiles ‘This account is also mine!

It's now possible to do this for channels and PeerTube platforms! To do this, add the link <a href="https://my-mastodon-instance/@profile" rel="me">Follow me on Mastodon!</a> (replace https://my-mastodon-instance/@profile with your actual Mastodon profile link) to the description section of your channel and/or profile. Administrators can do the same from their homepage settings.

Playback stability

We worked hard to update p2p-media-loader, the library that allows PeerTube to run P2P in the video player, to improve the stability of the player, especially for live streams configured in 'low latency' mode! It's certainly less visible work, but it's something we're proud of because it really improves the user experience. Many thanks to the developers of this library who have done a great job!

And much, much more!

As always, we're only highlighting some of the improvements to the software, but you can find the full list of changes made by the community in the changelog!

To help us continue to improve PeerTube, you can share this information, suggest improvements and, if you can afford it, make a donation to Framasoft, the non-for-profit organisation behind PeerTube.

Thanks a lot for your support!

Let's reflect the growth of the PeerTube Ecosystem

Seven year ago, PeerTube was mainly a tool that tech-savvy FOSS enthusiasts were happy to toy with. Then it became popular among content creators that wanted a self-hosted mirror of their YouTube/Twitch channels; and among communities who wanted to create and regulate their safe space (deaf people, queer people, etc.)

Nowadays, PeerTube is experiencing increasing success among content creators who publish original content (or exclusive content for their community), alternative media, and institutions: colleges, ministries of education, national television and radio archives, etc.

Public structures often need to share video content without attention-grabbing mechanisms or data exploitation.

To us, this is a new step in the evolution of PeerTube's audiences.

That is why this year, we've asked La Coopérative des Internets to lead a thorough UX research (complete with interviews, tests, etc.) and help us start a top to bottom redesign of the interface. Our goal was to improve on PeerTube so it would better fit the need of those new audiences. We were clear that everything was on the table : colors, vocabulary, layout...

Well, we are proud to release this v7 of PeerTube, that lays the ground to a complete remodeling of the interface.

First look: themes, new colors and vocabulary

PeerTube design, color schemes, vocabulary, etc. has been constructed over seven years, as we went along, learning, getting help from the community. This new design was an opportunity to take a step back an get some intentions behind the interface.

The new Light/beige default theme is calmer, easier on the eye than the original Black & orange one. We also added a Dark/brown theme into the core for the dark mode aficionados. Both aims to facilitate video browsing.

Creating those new themes was an opportunity to clean up and simplify how the interface is coded (specifically: clean up the CSS, with a focus on the variables), while limiting breakages with preexisting customized themes. It is now really easier to create new themes for PeerTube, and we hope you'll share your creations!

We also updated the PeerTube lingo. There is a reason we are now using the word "platform(s)" to talk about all the servers where PeerTube has been installed.

Yes, calling them "instance(s)" has been the norm in the tech savvy-world of activity-pub enthusiasts. But, to those not privileged enough to know about the fediverse and its protocol, the word platform is self-explanatory, and facilitates inclusion.

Enjoying simpler and relevant layouts

There are lots of informations to display on any PeerTube page. The layouts and menus grew organically during seven years of development... and needed some pruning! We remodeled those menus and pages to bring forward relevant informations, and present a more intuitive way to find out what you are looking for.

For exemple, content creators used to access their channels and uploaded video in their library (where any PeerTube user can get to their playlists, history, etc. of the videos they watched). Now in PeerTube v7, there is a new section called "video space" specific for video uploaders' needs.

In the same way, "admin" pages for PeerTube platforms administrators have now been separated into an Overview page (to get more info about users, hosted videos, etc.), a Moderation one (to manage abuses, blocking, registrations), and a Settings one (to access configurations, runners, etc.)

The several pages that presented the videos on a PeerTube platform (Recently added, Local videos, Trending) have been merged into a "Browse videos" page, that includes quick filters to display the same selections of content in a more forward way.

The same intent has driven the new layout of the "Discover videos" page we hope it will empower curious users.

Obviously, the left bar and header menus have been reorganized to reflect those changes and make navigation even more intuitive. You can now access your account settings and notifications from the header menu, as it is customary on other websites.

Displaying relevant information to show video diversity

A big feedback from new users was that the old interface was confusing, that is was hard for a user to know where they were, and where the videos came from.

That is why, in PeerTube v7, we have added more ways for platforms owners to customize and identify their platforms: easily add a banner (used on pages, mobile app exploration, and our search engine SepiaSearch) and a platform icon (used by the mobile application) More, the name and description of their platform is now displayed to non-registered users in the left hand menu.

We have also changed how video miniatures appear in all pages that lists videos. Channel avatar are always displayed so it's easier to identify creators, titles are highlighted, the date and viewcount of the video are present but toned down. Those changes make pages that lists videos easier to read, and facilitate identifying the video you want to watch.

Accessibility on the forefront

The redesign was also the opportunity to prioritize the interface accessibility (for impaired people). In 2023, we prepared the code and worked on what we knew... so the planned 2024 full accessibility audit (thanks to the NGI Entrust consortium) would bring as much new and detailed improvements as possible.

Thanks to the audit, we have improved on so many issues: we fixed color contrats and themes, progress bar, several components, and various screen reader issues. We added missing labels on interactive elements, "skip menu" links, underlining to links. We also improved keyboard navigation, and re-implemented components of a non-accessible dependency.

We sincerely think that PeerTube have caught up with accessibility issues and should be up to standards... but we know, now, that there is always room for improvement, and for learning directly from those who are concerned.

Editing captions, promoting videos and more...

With the brand new remote transcoding tool we introduced last year, getting a transcription or subtitles for your video is easier than ever. But the caption editing tool was... hum... let's say "barebone". We are now introducing a new modal that makes editing captions really convenient.

We welcomed and integrated upstream a community contribution on SEO (search engine optimization), to help promote PeerTube-hosted-content on search engines. A platform avatar now appears in the opengraph tags, empty accounts and channels are hidden from the sitemap, while additional video tags are now present there.

Last, PeerTube has been translated into Slovak.

We really want to take time to thank the community that contributes to translations of PeerTube, we would never have thought that our software would one day be available in more than 38 languages.

Huge thanks to all of you, wonderful people, who took time and care to contribute on our translation tool: you are amazing.

There is more to come...

We still have more work planned from this whole interface remodel. We hope to deliver it in the firsts months of 2025. First, we are currently finishing the translation of the UX research report from La Coopérative des Internets and we will publish it in the hope that it will help the whole fediverse community.

We will also wait a bit for PeerTube administrators to update their platforms, and then update the PeerTube documentation with new screenshots, and the new menus pathways.

Our next interface changes will focus on streamlining the channels & videos management experience for content creators (where several tools and menus added to the pile over the years). We also plan on fine-tuning the categorization of NSFW videos.

We obviously have many more items to our 2025 roadmap, but are still trying to secure funds to realize them: we'll keep you informed as soon as we know more!

About funds, we really want to thank the NGI0 Entrust program for their grant that funded most of the work on this new version (and on the PeerTube mobile app we released last week). The NLnet team has been a great partner on the management of this grant, and the accessibility audit from the consortium has really made a huge difference.

Another step into PeerTube growth

Even though we have been developing and maintaining the PeerTube software for 7 years, we, at Framasoft, are far from being an IT company. First because we are a not-for-profit (funded through donations, you can support us here), and then because our goal is, actually, to help others educate themselves on digital issues, surveillance capitalism, etc. and to give them tools that helps them get digitally emancipated.

Developing PeerTube has been, to us, an (happy) accident. We wanted to show that with one paid developer (for the first six years, then two), very little means (~ €650,000 over 7 years) and lots of community contributions, we can create a radical alternative to YouTube and Twitch. It also took a lot of patience. From the get go, we knew we needed to aim for a slow but steady pace of growth for the software, the network of video platforms it federates, the whole ecosystem and the audiences it reached.

Videos and live-streams are increasingly watched on mobile devices. We knew the next step to widen the audience of the PeerTube network of platforms was to develop a mobile client. Last year, we decided to hire Wicklow (who completed his last internship, before graduating, here with us), to train him on mobile technologies, develop a mobile app, while continuing to get familiar with PeerTube's core code.

Getting funded and getting help

This was (and still is) a big decision: a new hire needs to be funded (our huge thanks to NLnet and the NGI0 Entrust program!), and we want to stay a small structure, so we don't have lots of room in our team. In hindsight, though, we believe it was the right one.

We surrounded ourselves with Zenika, to get help on architecture and experience on mobile strategy. We soon realized that peer-to-peer video sharing wouldn't be a wise strategy on mobile devices. After benchmarking different technologies, Wicklow picked Flutter for the development.

La Coopérative des Internets (French design workers-owed-company), helped us pinpoint the relevant user experience and design an app fit for videos on the fediverse. We decided, for the first release, to limit the scope of the app to the "spectator use-case": browsing and watching videos.

We plan to share all their reports soon (early 2025), as soon as we put in the final touches. We hope that sharing this expertise and experience will help other FLOSS initiatives in their endeavor.

In the meanwhile, the PeerTube Mobile app is (as always with us) Free-libre and open-source, and you can find the source code here on our repository.

Fediverse complexities made simple

This preparatory work helped us realize that a mobile client was an amazing opportunity to simplify the PeerTube experience. PeerTube is not a video platform: it's a network of video platforms, each with their own rules, means and focus, that can choose to federate with others (or not).

It is, by design, more complex than a centralized platform. One of the main feedback we got from video enthusiasts was

"I don't know where to get an account. I don't know where to search & find videos" (even though we maintain SepiaSearch).

Local account

Within a mobile client, we can create some kind of local account, directly on your device, so you get your watch-list, playlists, faves, etc. It saves you the hassle of finding a platform where you'd need to create an account if you just want to enjoy video content.

Explore platforms

We can also include a search engine and an interface to explore the federation of PeerTube platforms and find videos suited to your interest. Not everyone knows SepiaSearch (and other fediverse search engines) exists: you get it from the get go, in your pocket.

Highlighting platforms' diversity

Finally, we can present content in a way that highlights the platforms, and show you where the videos/channels you watch are hosted. Differentiating platforms is a practical, visual way of introducing the concept of federation to a wider audience.

Designing out dark patterns

Humility check: a small French nonprofit will never have Google's workforce nor Amazon's money (and vice versa). But we have an edge: we are not constrained by surveillance capitalism rules, and its captology models.

Neither PeerTube nor the mobile app have any interest into grabbing your attention, forcefeeding you ads and milking behavioural and personal data from you.

That is how we freed the design from toxic design patterns such as doom scrolling, curated feeds, needy notifications and so on.

It might sound obvious, but it takes real effort to concieve an interface cleaned from what has unfortunately became the new normal. Even more if you need to keep it familiar enough so it says easy to use.

A very first build, limited by (play & i) stores

We knew beforehand that fitting into Google's PlayStore and Apple AppStore would be a challenge. They clearly weren't ready to host a client for (not-a-platform but) a network of autonomous video-sharing platforms, published by a small French nonprofit, funded through its independent donation website.

We knew about the issues encountered by Thorium (another PeerTube mobile client). We got help and advices from Gabe, who develops the streaming tool Owncast (may your keyboard always repel crumbs and click smoothly), and encountered many obstacles... We knew about all that but, oh my Tux, it was a wild ride.

After jumping though hoops, here we are, you can download the PeerTube mobile app here:

Download the lastest apk (Android/Advanced)

(un-)Limiting the federation

To get through Apple's (and, in a lesser way, Google's) validation processes, we had to present the mobile app with a curated "allowlist" of PeerTube platforms that meet their standards.

Here is the state of those limitations right now:

• Apple AppStore: limited to a very strict allowlist. Truth be told, a week before release, we are still unsure of being validated. Once we manage it, we'll see how to widen the list & let users add platforms they want
• Google Play Store: limited allowlist, but users can already add the platforms they want. We plan to widen the allowlist next
• F-Droid and direct download apk: all PeerTube platforms we have indexed on SepiaSearch are available. If an instance isn't declared to our index or is moderated, you can add it manually.

We cannot stress enough how their stores are not ready for independent solidarity-oriented networks. For exemple, a small "support us" donation link in our website footer or even on one of the allowed platforms triggered a "nope" from Apple.

And that's consistent: as seen in their fight with Epic (owners of Fortnite) Apple take their share in every in-app purchases. They have an economic interest to keep your expenses enclosed in their ecosystem. Please, please: consider getting your freedom back ;).

Coming soon, in the PeerTube App

Fitting into Apple's (and Google's) very small boxes took time and energy, more than what we expected. We decided to release a first (incomplete) version of the app in December anyway, and gradually improve on it.

Here are the features we plan to develop and share for the PeerTube app:

• Soon (early 2025)
  • Finalize and publish design and mobile strategy reports
  • Publish documentation
  • Play video in background
  • Log in to one's account, gets subscriptions, comment videos
  • next video recommandation
  • improve on the limited platforms list situation
• Then (mid 2025 (if funded))
  • adapt to tablets
  • adapt to TVs (AndroidTV... AppleTV will depend on their limitations)
  • Watch offline (for downloadable content)

Right now, we are still waiting to secure funding for those mid-2024 features (for which we have requested a NLnet grant).

Depending on the app success and usage, we would love to add the content creator usecase to the app. But that's a big one: upload and publish a video, manage one's content, create a livestream, etc. We are still wondering where, when and how to get funds for this undertaking.

Care, Share and Contribute!

This is the part where we need you.

We hope you will enjoy this app, download and use it, and share it with your friends. This is a new gateway to promote PeerTube content, get audience to fabulous content creators, entice them to share more and boost that virtious loop.

This app is also a way of showcasing how media could be presented, when they are made with care for your agency and attention. More than ever: sharing is caring.

You can also contribute by reporting bugs (within the app), helping on the code (here is the git repository), and translating the interface. This is an important one: right now, the App is only available in English and French. Your language contributions are welcomed here on our translation platform.

Obviously, we plan to maintain the app, add translations, implement bugfixes and security updates when needed: but this has a cost. We need to secure Framasoft's 2025 budget to make Wicklow's position permanent in our team (which is a priority to us). Our donation campaign is active right now, you can add your support here (and thanks!).

You can help us continue to improve PeerTube by sharing this information, suggesting improvements and, if you can afford it, making a donation to Framasoft, the association that develops PeerTube.

Thanks in advance for your support!
Framasoft

Download the lastest apk (Android/Advanced)

Separate audio and video streams for more flexibility

Separating the audio and video streams not only reduces the size of the files on the server, as it is no longer necessary to duplicate the audio file for each video resolution, but also allows you to stream only the audio of a video via an Audio only option in the player!

This is a very useful feature for streaming music that can display an album cover, or for using less bandwidth when listening to a conference where no video is required.

This new feature also allows PeerTube to ingest an audio only live stream. This means that you can stream live music on PeerTube, which will only display an Audio player.

Finally, we've taken the opportunity to simplify the video download modal, which now displays the essential information for each available resolution, with the option to include or exclude audio in the file being downloaded. The advanced options are still available by selecting Video File next to the Download modal title.

Browse subtitles in the transcription widget

In addition to the classic subtitles integrated into the video player, it is now possible to have a subtitle panel on the right side of the video. This panel allows you to:

• Follow subtitles in real time
• Return to a section of the video by clicking on a sentence
• Search for a sentence or word to return to a specific point in the video

Set up Youtube-dl for smoother imports

Youtube-dl is an essential tool for importing videos and related information from other video platforms (such as PeerTube, Youtube, Vimeo and many others).

This new version of PeerTube adds the ability for administrators to set up multiple proxies dedicated to youtube-dl, which PeerTube will randomly select to bypass certain restrictions. It is also now possible to use another version of youtube-dl, a binary that contains additional dependencies that enable features such as impersonation (i.e. pretending to be a real browser).

And much more

As with every release, a number of user experience and interface improvements have been made:

• Better resolution label for custom video aspect: 1920x816 videos are now displayed as 1080p instead of 816p
• Better visibility of chapter markers in the player's progress bar: they are now displayed as small dots in the progress bar
• Smoother resume of live playback: only the video player is reloaded
• Added the ability to easily copy server error logs via a dedicated button
• Instance admins can now change the maximum number of frames per second for videos (limited to 60 by default)

You can find all the bug fixes, improvements and other changes in the changelog!

Finally, we're still preparing the mobile application and we'll have some good news to announce at the end of the year!

You can help us continue to improve PeerTube by sharing this information, suggesting improvements and, if you can afford it, making a donation to Framasoft, the association that develops PeerTube.

Thanks in advance for your support!
Framasoft

Comments moderation

Moderation is always the least exciting part and can also be the most time-consuming. To help you manage this, PeerTube v6.2 not only adds a new page listing all the comments made on your videos, which you can now approve manually, but also the ability to create word lists that will automatically put comments containing them in the moderation queue!

For example, if you want to prevent negative comments from appearing directly on your videos, you can create a word list:

This means that comments containing them will automatically be put on pending review for approval:

You can then approve or reject them on the page where the comments are listed:

This feature is also available for administrators! They can easily display videos uploaded to their instance that contain specific keywords. This can be useful for monitoring content that doesn't comply with your terms of service, or for monitoring a sporadic phenomenon that is particularly viral.

The idea for this feature came from the study conducted by the German ISD. Our goal is to improve this in the future, when we envision users being able to subscribe to and share lists of words to make moderation of accounts and instances easier!

Automatic transcription

In version 5.2 of PeerTube, we introduced the concept of PeerTube runner, a small program that allows PeerTube to perform heavy tasks (such as video encoding) remotely.

France Université Numérique, a public interest group running a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) platform with a lot of videos, was interested in the flexible architecture of the PeerTube runner for their own use.

In order to improve the accessibility of videos and at the same time contribute to the PeerTube ecosystem, France Université Numérique and the NLnet Foundation, through the NGI Zero Entrust fund, funded the development of automatic video transcription within PeerTube and the PeerTube runners. This transcription makes it possible to automatically create subtitles for videos using an artificial intelligence tool, Whisper, which provides very good results. The artificial intelligence engine and its model can be customised in the configuration.

This new feature can be enabled by PeerTube admins to automatically generate subtitles for newly published videos. The creation of subtitles can also be triggered on demand, allowing administrators to create subtitles for videos published before PeerTube 6.2. This automatic subtitling can also be done by PeerTube runners, as it requires a lot of computing power. France Université Numérique is already planning to use this method to subtitle all its content, which represents 3,500 hours of video.

Many thanks to NLnet (whose funding, unfortunately, is in danger of drying up) and France Université Numérique for their help and contribution!

And more…

As well as making your moderation life easier, PeerTube offers a new way of creating a thumbnail preview for your videos (in addition to the ability to select it from your device): directly from an image in your video! Play the video down to the image that perfectly illustrates the content and display it. Thanks to Kent Anderson for this external contribution!

To make sure you don't miss a live broadcasts, they are now highlighted on the Recently Added, Trending, Account videos and Channel videos pages.

And as with every new version, you can find all the bug fixes, improvements and other changes in the changelog!

You want to help us improve PeerTube? You can do so by sharing this information, by suggesting improvements and, if you can afford it, by donating to Framasoft, the non-profit that develops PeerTube.

Thanks in advance for your support!
Framasoft

In addition to the integration of account import/export and other great features that we'll detail in this blog post, this version fixes 2 important security vulnerabilities concerning the ActivityPub federation (detailed at the end of the article).

We therefore recommend that you update your instances as soon as possible!

Account import/export

It is now possible to export all your account data (videos, channels, preferences, etc.) to a downloadable archive. This archive can be used as a backup tool or re-imported to another PeerTube instance. To be clear, this is not (yet) an account migration! Data (such as channels or videos) is duplicated and not moved from your old PeerTube account to your new instance.

You can find the list of data that will or won't be exported in our documentation!

This feature simplifies the process of creating an account on the "right" PeerTube instance, as it's now much easier to switch!

Original video file preserved

Until now, when you uploaded a video to PeerTube, it was transcoded into multiple formats and the original file was deleted. From v6.1, this version is preserved and can be downloaded from your library, as well as being present in the export archive!

In practical terms, this means that you can have an archive of your videos on a PeerTube instance (rather than taking up space on both your personal hard drive and a lower quality on the PeerTube instance).

Banner and avatar for instances

To help you better customize your instance, you can now add a banner that will be visible in the instance search on JoinPeerTube and on your PeerTube instance on the About page, login page, registration page, and also on the homepage using the special <peertube-instance-banner> tag!

As for the avatar, it will be visible on the future mobile application and can also be used on the homepage of your instance!

Shorter duration to count a view

To get closer to the behaviour of other centralised video platforms (Vimeo, Instagram, TikTok, Mux...), we've decided to count a View after 10 seconds (instead of 30 seconds).

But that's not the only thing that's changing: a view is no longer based on the user's IP address, but on a unique identifier generated by the web browser. This ensures, for example, that a video watched by 20 people in a university does not count as just one (because the computers tend to have the same IP address).

By the way, uploaders can access to detailed statistics on views and viewers. And PeerTube v6.1 now shows the number of viewers by region in addition to country.

More accessible subtitles

Access to subtitles has been made easier by adding an icon directly in the video player. Clicking on the CC button (7 in the screenshot) will display the subtitles in the last used language (or the first available in the list). You can also select a different language from the player settings menu (8 in the screenshot).

...and there's always more!

As always, there are many other improvements, bug fixes and changes. The full list can be found in the changelog, but here's a small selection:

• This release fixes 2 major security issues in the ActivityPub federation. The first fix prevents data associated with private videos (likes, comments, etc.) from being leaked. The other fixes incorrect access control of objects coming from the federation. More details about this second vulnerability will be provided at a later date.
• Turkish joins the family of 37 languages available on PeerTube! Thank you (merci, gracias, teşekkürler) to everyone who contributed to the thousands of translated strings!
• On the UX (User eXperience) side, you can now download a video directly from your library, and admins have the ability to sort users and videos by file size stored on the server disk.

Do you want to help us improve PeerTube? You can by sharing this information, by suggesting improvements and, if you can afford it, by donating to Framasoft, the association that develops PeerTube.

Thanks in advance for your support!

Framasoft

You have been waiting for this for years, and so have we...
... welcome to the PeerTube Ecosystem Newsletter! jingle

In this newsletter, we'll share with you some news, videos, projects or anything else related to the PeerTube ecosystem that we're excited about!

PeerTube in 2024

PeerTube is now 6 years old 🥳!
The project has come a long way to become the mature software it is now.
Does that mean it is finished? Not at all!
Find out what we plan to do with PeerTube this year in our news from last December!
Spoiler alert: get your smartphones ready!

P2Play ­— An Android PeerTube application for smartphones

Speaking of smartphones apps, Ivan Agosto resumed the development of P2Play!
P2Play is an open-source Android application for PeerTube.
You can download it from Play Store and F-Droid!

By the way, did you know that we at Framasoft are also working on a mobile app? We'll let you know as soon as we're ready!

A PeerTube Retrogaming Playlist

Fedi.Video, a fediverse account that helps you discover PeerTube content, has made a playlist full of retrogaming content found in different instances of PeerTube!
If you like pipes and shells, this is probably for you!

Obsidian Urbex - Abandonned Places Videos

Obsidian Urbex is a channel dedicated to urban exploration videos.
If, like me, you're fascinated by abandoned places that used to be luxurious, you'll love this collection of short videos!

"How do I find PeerTube content?"

If you read about PeerTube on the Fediverse a lot, you'll see this question is getting asked a lot!
We, at Framasoft, are working on improving this aspect of PeerTube but for now, did you know about Sepia Search, the search engine we built to find out PeerTube content?

Check it out at https://sepiasearch.org/

Very quick fix

Can you believe there has been only 2 hours between the reporting of an XSS injection in embed, by Syst3m0ver from aramido GmbH, and the release (v6.0.4) with the fix? If you're the administrator of a PeerTube instance, please update as soon as possible to v6.0.4!

Reminder: If you find a vulnerability, please contact us!

If you enjoyed this first newsletter, please give it a thumbs up and click the bell… wait, no 🤔
But if you have any PeerTube related content (channel, videos, app…) that you want to highlight, feel free to share it with our mastodon's account and we may relay it in our next newsletter!

Peertube also evolves thanks to your ideas, so don't hesitate to share them on our ideas board.

À bientôt !

It's the reason why, with the support of NLnet and Octopuce, we have been running a real world stress tests on a regular PeerTube instance. Of course with the aim of optimizing the software, but first and foremost to be able to confidently give the number of concurrent viewers a PeerTube instance should be able to handle and understand how the P2P behaves in such conditions.

We chose to simulate 1,000 viewers as it is a symbolic number, but also because it covers 99% of the streams broadcasted on Twitch in 2022. PeerTube would then be able to technically handle 99% of these use cases, which is a large number of users ;)

If you would rather skip the technical stuff, you can jump directly to the conclusion.

Setup the benchmark

To get closer to real life testing, we decided to run 1,000 Chrome web browsers watching the same video, each one having a dedicated public IP to properly simulate actual real viewers.

In order to run 1,000 real Chrome web browsers, we decided to create a Selenium grid and to spawn 1,000 Selenium nodes using Docker. This way, each node can have its own IPv6 public address. Luc, the amazing sysadmin at Framasoft, developed scripts to automatically generate this Selenium grid using Hetzner cloud. His work can be found on https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube/selenium-stack.

After the first conclusive tests where we reached 500 web browsers, we encountered difficulties with Hetzner cloud as they refused to increase our VPS quota to a number that would have allowed us to seamlessly run the Selenium grid with 1,000 web browsers. After spending several days trying to find alternatives, Octopuce, a French hosting company that hosts several PeerTube instances, offered us to use a powerful server to help us reach our goal of 1,000 web browsers. Shout out to them!

We have made several performance improvements in PeerTube core to reach 1,000 viewers. Some of them are already available in PeerTube V6 like federation and view events optimizations. Some others will be available in the next release (V6.1): ability to customize views/playback events interval, new viewer federation protocol to send much less messages etc.

Once the Selenium grid is ready and the PeerTube instance is updated to include the above performance improvements, we can spawn 1,000 web browsers to load a video on https://peertube2.cpy.re/ (our nightly updated PeerTube instance) using WebdriverIO. Each automated web browser is programmed to load the video watch page, play the video, and wait there until the test ends.

Benchmark conditions

The test PeerTube instance that has been installed following the official installation guide on Debian 12.2 with nginx, PostgreSQL and Redis on the same machine.

Hardware specifications:

• 4 vCore of i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz
• Has a hard drive (not a SSD)
• 4Go of RAM
• 1Gbit/s network

The important PeerTube instance settings:

• The chat plugin is not enabled
• Logs are in warning mode to reduce logging overhead
• Client logs are enabled
• Metrics are enabled but HTTP request duration metrics are disabled
• Viewers federation V2 is enabled (feature behind a feature flag that we plan to enable in PeerTube 6.2)
• Object Storage (S3) is not enabled

Benchmarked videos/lives are public, so static files are directly served by nginx.

The Chrome web browser has its network speed limited using:

browser.setNetworkConditions({
  offline: false,
  download_throughput: 2000 / 8 * 1024, // 2000kbit/s,
  upload_throughput: 300 / 8 * 1024, // 300kbit/s
  latency: 500
})

Unfortunately, network conditions don't apply on WebRTC so we were unable to limit P2P uploads/downloads. These settings apply only on HTTP requests.

Benchmark results

We ran stress tests on 4 scenarios:

• A live video with Normal Latency setting
• A live video with High Latency setting
• A live with High Latency setting where half of the viewers had P2P disabled
• A regular VOD video

Live videos provide only one resolution with a bitrate of 650kbit/s, while the VOD video provides 4 resolutions, with the highest one having a bitrate of 1.2Mbit/s.

Here are the results of our 4 scenarios where 1,000 viewers are connecting on the live/video within a few minutes.

Live with a normal latency

Using the default live settings and so a latency of ~30 seconds, we can see that PeerTube CPU usage peaks as web browsers load the video (11:08:00) and tapers off as viewers watch the video (11:11:00). The main job of PeerTube at that time is to handle playback metrics and view events coming from web browsers for statistics and federation. RAM consumption and NodeJS event loop lag remain stable.

Most viewers download the video using HTTP when they load the page to buffer the live segments, and progressively try to download more distant segments using P2P. It's the reason why we see an HTTP download peak of 150Mbit/s at the beginning of the graph (11:08:00) which gradually drops to 90Mbit/s (11:12:00). At this point, web browsers mainly exchange live segments using P2P at up to 370Mbit/s. Under optimal conditions, the P2P aspect of PeerTube reduces the bandwidth required to broadcast a live video by a factor of 3 or 4, which corroborates feedback received from some PeerTube admins.

Live with a high latency

We wanted to test a live with High latency setting set (~60 seconds) so web browsers have more time to download live segments.

We now have a ratio of 65Mbit/s for HTTP and 370Mbit/s for P2P (15:25:00). A nice improvement, but we think we can improve the HTTP/P2P ratio in the future by changing some P2P engine settings.

Live with a high latency and half of the viewers with P2P disabled

This scenario tries to mimic "real world" viewers by disabling P2P for half of them.

We have a ratio of 260Mbit/s for HTTP and 190Mbit/s for P2P (15:42:00). The swarm of 500 P2P-enabled viewers exchange segments with the same ratio as the live with a high latency, while viewers with P2P disabled just download segments from the server.

VOD video

It's interesting to focus on lives and analyze their P2P ratio since viewers are simultaneously watching and sharing the same segments. But we can also imagine use cases when a VOD video becomes viral:

Bandwidth consumption is much higher than for a live because the video bitrate is higher, but also because the web browser buffers much more the video, especially if P2P segments are available. This is the reason why we have a peak of 2,000Mbit/s for P2P at the beginning, gradually dropping to 1,150Mbit/s (15:10).

If we zoom on the HTTP graph:

We observe that web browsers download nearby segments using HTTP to avoid playback problems, and then try to download distant segments using P2P. That's why we have a peak of 200Mbit/s for HTTP download at the beginning of the graph (15:09:00).

After a few minutes the P2P/HTTP ratio becomes very big with 1150Mbit/s for P2P and 25Mbit/s for HTTP (15:14:00). It means P2P works very well on VOD videos when viewers are watching the same parts of the video. It's an expected behaviour since we have more time to exchange and buffer distant video segments using P2P.

As a bonus, here is the screen of my personal web browser during the stress test where we can see that in an optimal situation and a fiber broadband connection, "regular" viewers can have a very big P2P ratio (800MB uploaded/100MB downloaded).

Technical Overview

Here is an overview of P2P ratio of the live with normal latency and the VOD video with 1,000 viewers:

We consider these values hold in optimal conditions, since our simulated web browsers had a fast internet connection for P2P that we could not limit. But in our experience, they seem to represent what happens in real life.

Conclusion and further work

With these results we can see that a regular PeerTube website (server rental at around 20$/month) can correctly handle 1,000 concurrent viewers if the administrator follows our scalability guide.

It means that PeerTube, a Free-Libre software funded by grassroots donations and grants from the NGI programs, that has been developed over 6 years by benevolent contributors and one paid developer, offers an affordable, resilient, efficient and solid alternative to tech giants' technology. It might be hard to realize but it is true: together, we made it this far.

Even if handling 1,000 concurrent viewers is a nice achievement, PeerTube can still go further with extra configuration.

We also have a few ideas on how to handle even more simultaneous viewers in the future:

• Optimize the settings of our P2P engine for when "High latency" is set for lives
• Add PeerTube configuration to specify external P2P trackers more suited to handle more peers
• Distribute the work to handle views events on multiple machines
• Lazy load some components in the client (like the comments section) to avoid making HTTP requests if the components are not in the web browser viewport

Thanks for reading and don't hesitate to share your experiences with PeerTube and/or limits you encountered, we'd be happy to work on them. Also, don't forget to support our work if you can, and share the good news!

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!

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.

PeerTube is a software: 6 years of developments

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.

Contributors also helped by translating PeerTube into more than 36 languages (join them here), by providing answers on our forum, by updating our official documentation, or by sharing ideas on our Let’s Improve PeerTube feedback tool.

There are now more than a thousand PeerTube platforms all over the world (that we know of ^^), hosting almost a million videos. We 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.

Fortunately, others are working towards promoting and moderating PeerTube content, by creating directories [FR], recommendations threads, moderation tools, Firefox extensions, and all kinds of amazing content.

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 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 €. Over six years. As we got two grants from the European commission (through the NGI0 Search & Discovery and Entrust programs) totaling 132 000 €, 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 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.

(source – 29.243 B USD // 632,853 USD)

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.

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:

• Institutions
  • European commission
  • Netherlands Institute for sound and vision
• Educators
  • French Ministry of Education FOSS-based platform
  • University of Philippines Diliman’s digital learning programs
• Independent medias
  • Blast (French independent left-wing online media)
  • Howlround (Theater Commons media based in the Emerson College, Boston)
• Citizens
  • Urbanists.video (videos about walkable, livable places)
  • S2S (safe space for deaf and hearing impaired people, videos about/in French Sign Language)
  • Live it live (live music concerts)
• Creators
  • 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.

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 value: 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 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 worked on limiting Framasoft’s growth, and had 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 carriers. 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 didn’t plan on hiring 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.

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 experimentations... 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!)

We plan to work on promoting PeerTube’s ecosystem, through the blog and newsletter on our website JoinPeerTube, our Mastodon account, and by working on a showcase Peer.tube instance.

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.

(and if all goes well, we’ll publish the replay on the same channel)

Funded by you... and Europa!

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 €138,659: we can’t do it without your help!

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!

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.

March 2023: PeerTube v5.1

You'll get more details in the news dedicated to the 5.1 release, so to keep it short, this version brought:

• An "asking for an account" feature, where instance moderators can manage and moderate news account requests
• A back-to-live button, so when you can lag behind during a livestream, you can go back to the direct
• improvements on the authentification 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!

PeerTube v6: powered by your ideas!

Enough about 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 a pedagogical 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 informations... 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.

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.

Please stay tuned by subscribing to PeerTube's Newsletter, following PeerTube's Mastodon account or keeping an eye on the Framablog.

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 €176,425: we can't do it without your help!

Thanks again for supporting PeerTube,
Framasoft's team.

Let's see what it's all about :)

This is a resolution: video transcoding

Video transcoding is the process of converting a video file into different formats that can be played on different devices. In simple terms, it takes your video file (for example, mp4) and converts it into different formats that can be read by web browsers, applications, etc. Transcoding is done when a video is uploaded to the PeerTube instance, during live broadcasts or when editing your video with the PeerTube Studio.

In addition to the formats, transcoding allows you to have different video qualities (from pixel mush to the possibility of seeing an ant when zooming in on a panorama). These are the famous '720p', '1080p' and so on.

The problem is that transcoding 4k videos of kittens requires a lot of server computing resources (called "CPU"). Even a small kitten. And big CPUs mean big prices. It's a shame to have to rent a more powerful server just to transcode faster one big video a month.

If only we had a solution... 🤔

This is an evolution: remote transcoding

The solution we propose: remote transcoding! The idea is to let the servers of the PeerTube platform broadcast the videos, by having the ability to run transcoding tasks on other computers (for example, remote servers, that could be dedicated to the task, that could be shared, etc.). You can find out how to do this in the documentation.

We explain here how to set up one of these remote servers by installing a "PeerTube runner" on it. You can even turn your personal computer into a runner using command lines, just long enough to transcode your videos! Yes, it is THAT flexible!

For the more tech-savvy among us, this feature was inspired by Gitlab runners for their architecture and BOINC for their ease of use. This is one of the strengths of free-libre softwares: rather than reinventing the wheel, we take inspiration from the work of those who were there before and build a new brick for those who come after us!

You can find out more in our documentation.

You can see how it's done on this video and also learn more from this video of Jeena (who shares his chronicles as a PeerTube platform administrator on his PeerTube instance, of course) presenting how remote transcoding works.

This is a (French) revolution

With the federation of video catalogues, the peer-to-peer broadcasting in the event of a video's success, the redundancy of videos for PeerTube platforms that want to help each other, the possibility of storing videos on a dedicated server... PeerTube has always aimed to democratize online video hosting and distribution.

Remote transcoding takes a step further by encouraging the pooling of CPU-intensive tasks and (we hope) encouraging communities to work together. From now on, a PeerTube platform can be hosted on very low-power (and therefore low-cost) servers.

In addition, this new feature has been designed to, in the future, enable other CPU-intensive tasks to be performed remotely (such as audio-to-text video transcription).

A technical feature like remote transcoding isn't exactly sexy. These developments are not the easiest to fund, especially through donations. We'd like to thank NLnet for supporting us and giving us access to NGI0's funding programs that funded this feature!

These are improvements

In addition to remote transcoding, 5.2 includes a number of improvements:

• RSS feeds for podcasts: a first building block has been developed to allow your PeerTube content to be integrated into podcast players!
• Mouse-free navigation: if you like to navigate using only the keyboard, you'll love some improvements!
• The Studio feature (introduced in version 4.2), which allows you to edit an uploaded video, has finally been documented (even though it is incredibly simple)!
• Define the visibility of a replay: it is now possible to define a different visibility for a replay than for a live. This means you can make a live public, but make the replay private (or vice versa, or whatever)! This feature was developed by Wicklow, a PeerTube development intern: thanks to him!
  

  

This is a call for donations

Remote transcoding is brand new: we need your feedback on how to improve it (and you can also just tell us you like it). The best place to do this is our forum).

What's next? PeerTube is on its way to v6, towards the end of the year. In this version you'll be able to password protect videos (thanks to Wicklow!), get a preview thumbnail by hovering over the playback bar, add chapters to your video and even upload a new version of your video. In short, we've got a lot of work to do!

Do you want to help us improve PeerTube? You can do so by contributing to the software, sharing this information and (if you can afford it) making a donation to our not-for-proft, Framasoft.

Thanks in advance for your support!

Framasoft

Moderated account creation requests

First new feature in this minor release: account creation requests can now be validated a priori by administrators.

When this feature is enabled and a person registers on an instance, they will have to fill in a field (such as "Why do I want to create an account on this platform?") and then wait for their registration to be validated before they can access their account.

The moderators see the different requests and can accept or reject them.

An email is sent directly to the user when the request is processed. The account is automatically created when the request is approved.

In this way, we hope to allow different instances to reopen their registrations without risking potential waves of spam.

New "Resume Live" button

A "resume live" button has been added to the player! The button is red when the player is synchronized with the current live stream and grey when it is not. A single click to resynchronise the live stream is quite handy!

Improved management of external authentication plugins

Developers will be able to take advantage of an improvement to the API for external authentication plugins: define a quota for users, update users or implement an automatic redirect to the external service when a session expires. These improvements were financed by the Department of Public Education (DIP) of the State of Geneva. Thanks!

And more...

This version has seen various improvements to the accessibility of the interface, as well as performance improvements (optimized rendering of the home page editor and more efficient comment retrieval).

Another development worth mentioning is the arrival of two new languages: Icelandic and Ukrainian. Thanks to the contributors for these translations!

We have also fixed many bugs reported by the community. We are now up to more than 4000 tickets processed since the beginning of the PeerTube project, and that seems huge! This time spent improving, maintaining and supporting the software is funded directly by you, through your donations. Thank you very much!

We hope you find this new version useful and we thank again all PeerTube contributors!

Framasoft

It is important to note that we are dedicating only one developer to PeerTube (yes, only one!), PeerTube being one of more than fifty projects led by our association.

End of February: PeerTube 5.1

We plan to release version 5.1 at the end of February. Here are the new features we are planning to release:

• Easier management of account registrations (with administrator approval)
• Developers will be able to take advantage of an improved API for external authentication plugins (setting a quota, updating the user, etc.)
• Optimize retrieval of video comments
• Adding a Resume Live button in the video player
• Improvements and bug fixes (including bugs found during the end of December load test, in French)

May 2023: PeerTube 5.2

This May we plan to release PeerTube 5.2, which will feature remote transcoding (feature that received many votes!). This will reduce the power required for a PeerTube server by delegating power consuming tasks to external machines.
Initially this will only be for hosted videos, but will be designed to be able to evolve (for livestreams for example). Quite a technical challenge ahead!

November-December 2023: PeerTube v6

We plan to release the next major version of PeerTube at the end of the year, and the new features are all inspired by your suggestions on our feedback tool Let's Improve PeerTube. You will find:

• Adding chapters to videos
• Displaying a preview thumbnail in the progress bar
• Protecting videos with a password/token
• The possibility to upload a new version of your video

But also...

At the beginning of this year, we welcome Wicklow in the team, for a 6 months internship. This is an opportunity to support the PeerTube developer and to familiarize more people with the code base of the software.

We will also of course continue to fix bugs, clean up the code and improve the architecture of the software and support external and community development, such as the Live-Chat plugin.

Finally, we will work on content curation for our Peer.tube showcase platform (yes, with a dot in the middle!), to allow us to present a gateway to PeerTube, which looks like Framasoft.

PeerTube, like all our projects, is mainly funded by donations to our association. On this roadmap, only the remote transcoding feature of v5.2 is already funded, thanks to a donation from the NLnet foundation.

Do you want to help us achieve this roadmap? You can support us by contributing to PeerTube, by sharing this information and (if you can afford it) by making a donation to Framasoft.

Thank you in advance for your support!
Framasoft

Framasoft is a French non-profit of 38 members (10 employees, 28 volunteers), PeerTube is one of our 50+ projects, and we do all this work with only one developer (who is not event full time on PeerTube). Please note that maybe 2 or 3 among us understand, more or less fluently, German.

On dec. 19th, a journalist from Tagesspiegel Background informed us that a study by German researchers on the use of PeerTube by right-wing extremists was about to be published. He asked us 3 questions about the scope of the problem and what could be done, and we answered him that day.

On dec. 20th, we have been able to get this study (it is available online here) and translate it. This is why it took us time to write and publish a collective statement.

First of all, we would like to thank the researchers of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue for their work. The more we will gain knowledge of how disinformation manipulators and right-wing extremists use PeerTube, the more the PeerTube communities will learn how to effectively protect themselves from such content.

Shared knowledge is shared power.

PeerTube says no to fascists and conspiracy manipulators

Let's be crystal clear: Framasoft's values are fundamentally opposed to right-wing extremism. This is also true for conspiratorial manipulations that lead to hurting and killing people (here is our recently published manifest stating our core values - Warning: may be poorly translated from French).

We agree with the results of the study. In our experience, right-wing extremists represent a very, very small share of the PeerTube federation (called the "vidiverse"), but they know how to be very loud, energy consuming trolls.

We should not ignore the fact that, in 2022, if any society is producing fascist and Nazi groups, it is not because of technology, but because of a deeper problem, which is mainly related to the complacency of some governments with extreme right-wing ideas. Nevertheless, it is also true that some technical devices that work on the basis of audience measurement and advertising are the first to disseminate extremist ideas. The Fediverse does not work like that, but we should work to keep it healthy.

PeerTube is free software, we cannot prevent these people from using it. Germany, France and most modern democracies have already introduced laws that can lead Justice to condemn PeerTube administrators who knowingly and willingly host hateful and Nazi content.

What we can do (and have been doing and are willing to continue) is giving PeerTube communities the tools to moderate, protect themselves from and ostracize right-wing extremists and harmful PeerTube platforms.

We "moderate" (read: ban) fascist content from any tool we manage. Thus, we regularly clean the instance index. For example we removed from the index problematic instances, several of which are German. This does not prevent these instances from existing, but at least we try to keep the index healthy.

We need the communities to step up

The study clearly states it: one of the major solutions to such content relies in empowering the communities.

PeerTube-isolation is a blocklist that is maintained in total independence from us. Installing their plugin on your PeerTube platform can help you make sure you won't federate with dangerous content.

We encourage anyone who wants to help to contribute to the PeerTube-Isolation community work. We automatically pull out the instances they block from the index that feeds SepiaSearch, our PeerTube Search Engine.

Our goal is to keep harmful and hateful content isolated in their own federation bubble, where they can be as loud as they want. Thus they won't contaminate others with their dangerous filth. Thus they'll understand they are not welcomed in the PeerTube vidiverse, and they won't have any interest trying to invest it.

In addition, we are always exploring new ways to help PeerTube communities and administrators moderate hate speech and harmful content. If you can think of a feature we could add to PeerTube to help isolating such filth, please share it on Let's Improve PeerTube.

A call to (help) PeerTube instance administrators

That being said, a tool can only do so much.

Instance administrators need help, because they have several tasks to fulfill: system administration (backup, updates, etc.), content curation (do I want to host edutainment videos? original fictions? videos by Queer creators?), federation policies (which platforms do I want mine to follow? which follows do I accept?), moderation policies (and moderation can be needed in the federation choices, content hosted, comments, etc.)

It is a very complex job, and usually you should not to be alone to complete it. It is a crucial job, though. We need instance administrators to have rules about the platform they federate with, so they can enforce their own policies and - hopefully- stop the dissemination of harmful and dangerous content. But it is a lot of work, so it requires a lot of help.

If you want to help, try to join a PeerTube administration team. Offer them help. Report problematic content. If public organizations can provide training, help, and tools, it can always be useful ! But PeerTube is a Commons: we cannot address such an issue unless we work together as a (diverse and plural) community.

Shared knowledge is shared power

The PeerTube communities sure need more shared knowledge on right-wing extremists, their content, their methods, their arguments & fallacies, and how to protect ourselves from it.

But we also need more people helping and taking charge, together, as communities, because we are very invested in keeping PeerTube ecosystem healthy.

For this occasion, we have published a blog post summing up a year of hard work and improvements on the PeerTube ecosystem.

It also presents the new features of PeerTube v5, and what we feel we might work on next year.

• Learn all about those empowering new features on our blog;
• See the code of the V5 by yourself;
• Publish your ideas for PeerTube V6 on Let’s Improve PeerTube (and vote for the ones you’re excited about)
• Support PeerTube by supporting Framasoft, and find out about all our actions.

We would like to thank every person who has contributed to the PeerTube ecosystem throughout the year: y'all are amazing! This year, some features have been directly funded by PeerTube-supporting organizations (see our blogpost). Put together, their contributions represent a small half of our annual budget dedicated to PeerTube (which we estimate at 70 000 €). The other part comes from Framasoft’s budget, i.e. from the donations that our non profit receives from its mainly French-speaking community. To us, it seems almost unfair that it is mainly French speakers who finance a tool that has a truly international scope… So we need your help. Spread the word about our donation campaign around you, especially outside the French-speaking world.

If you want to help us fund our work in 2023 on PeerTube v6 and many other projects, please consider supporting Framasoft, share the address support.framasoft.org on your PeerTube platforms, in your communities that benefit from this alternative.

We hope you will enjoy PeerTube v5,
Framasoft

First of all, PeerTube v5 is on its way, as we have just published a release candidate version that will be tested out in the next few weeks. We can't wait to present you the improvements and new features!

In the meantime, we have just published a brand new redesign of JoinPeerTube. It took a lot of work to simplify this website. Our intention is to make it a welcoming tool, a kind of gateway into the PeerTube universe for everyone, especially for non-tech savvy people.

• Get a tour of this new JoinPeerTube (backstage infos included) on our blog;
• Visit the brand new JoinPeertube.org (and share it around you!);
• Support PeerTube by supporting Framasoft (that's us!), and all our actions.

We really hope this new website will help content creators and content enjoyers get a better grip on what PeerTube is and is not, and how to get started.

We, at Framasoft, are a small French non-profit that is exclusively funded by donations (87% of our budget being grassroots donations). We don't really know how to PR and market, especially in English. So most of our funding (that finances PeerTube's development, among other things) comes from the French-speaking audience.

Today, we have reached 27% of our 2022 donation campaign goals. We need you to help us spread the word in the non-French-speaking community that all our projects need support! If you want to help us fund PeerTube and many other projects in 2023, please consider supporting Framasoft.

We hope you will enjoy and share this new Joinpeertube.org,
Framasoft

We are pleased to announce this new version of PeerTube!

Ability to automatically import videos from a remote channel, UI improvements, more instance customization and much more... Let's look around and see what it brings us!
PeerTube v4.3 is out!

Automatic import of videos from a remote channel

This is THE feature you've been waiting for: ability to automatically import all videos from a remote channel (from another video platform) into one of your PeerTube channels. Really useful if you are a video maker publishing on several platforms who wants to make your channels visible on PeerTube. You can also use this feature to group videos from several remote channels in the same channel. A special thank to Florent, one of Skeptikón PeerTube Instance administrators, for developing this new feature.

To add a remote channel synchronization, simply click on the button Add synchronization located in My library menu / Channels tab / My synchronizations button and add the requested information:

• Remote channel URL: copy the channel's URL you want to import
• Video Channel: choose from the drop-down menu the channel you wish to synchronize with

Once this synchronization is created, PeerTube will watch the remote channel for new publications and will automatically import new videos into your channel.

You can also use this synchronization tool to import content from a remote playlist.

PeerTube UI improvements

In order to make PeerTube User Interface even more user-friendly, we are working with a designer from la Coopérative des Internets and have implemented some of her suggestions in this release.

We have reviewed the account creation page process to make some of the information you need to know before registering more explicit:

1. we explain why creating an account
2. we display instance terms and invite you to accept them
3. you are asked to fill the elements necessary to create your account with some explanations
4. you are asked to create your first channel (but you can skip this step)
5. your account is created

We also changed the location of the login page's elements to place the information message at the top.
To make it more visible, the search bar is now at the top center of each page.
Finally, we have increased the size and lightened the color of the default font to make it more accessible. These small changes will make PeerTube more comfortable for you to use.

Better integration of videos and live streams

As you probably know, it is possible to embed a PeerTube video player in other websites (by copying a small html code that you get by clicking on the Share button / Embed tab). Practical, isn't it?

Until now, we had a small display issue when embedding live videos: before and after the live schedule, the embedded player did not display anything and gave the impression that it was not working. To remedy this, we have added informative texts displayed before the start of live event (This live has not started yet) and once it has ended (This live has ended).

We have also added automatic playback to the embedded videos when the live broadcast starts. It is no longer necessary to refresh the web page regularly. Please note that some browsers are set by default to block automatic video playback and you will have to change your settings to benefit from this new feature.

More instances customizations

We improved PeerTube admin management. As an administrator, you can now:

• execute batch actions on federated instances
  Performing batch actions (selecting several items in order to apply to all of them the same treatment) was already available for the Overview tab pages (users, videos and comments). It is now available for the Federation tab pages. Very useful to delete several subscriptions at the same time or to reject some followers.

• disable transcoding of uploaded video or live stream original resolution
  As an instance's administrator, you can set the resolutions in which uploaded videos are transcoded. Until now, PeerTube always transcoded the original video file, even if its resolution was not enabled. This can be cumbersome for some instances. It is now possible to disable the original video transcoding when its resolution is higher than the maximum resolution set. To do this, go to the Administration menu, Configuration tab, then VOD Transcoding and check the box in front of the text Always transcode original resolution.

• delete a specific video file
  Storing multiple versions of a video can quickly increase your instance used disk space. You can now delete specific files from the web interface. This can be very useful if, for example, you want to delete all video files that are bigger than the resolution you have enabled for your instance.

And also

PeerTube supports 2 new languages: Toki Pona and Croatian!

We have also made several optimizations to make the software more scalable. As a result, its performance has been greatly improved.

There are many other improvements in this version. You can read the whole list on https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md.

Finally, we would like to remind you that we launched in July a feedback tool to collect your needs on PeerTube. We want to know what content creators, video-lovers and non-tech-savvy people miss from PeerTube or what changes/new experiences they would like to have. We invite you to have your say at Let's improve PeerTube!. And if you are not necessarily inspired, you can always vote for one of the 80 ideas already posted. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank all the people who made these proposals and all those who voted.

Thanks to all PeerTube contributors!
Framasoft

We need your help to share and contribute to a new feedback tool: Ideas.joinpeertube.org.

Five years of building the ecosystem of PeerTube

By the end of 2022, PeerTube will be five years in the making! In the last four years, with only one (not even full time!) paid developer, 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), 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 research, an even better video player, filtering videos on pages, advance administration and moderation tools, new video management tool, and a big code cleaning session (PeerTube v4, dec. 2021)

All of this, in 4 years, with only one employed developer, and financed through donations (please consider supporting us at Framasoft!).

This year has already brought many improvements, and we know what we want to do for the v5 by the end of 2022, but... what next?

Ideas for PeerTube: let's get non-tech-savvy people's feedback

Until now, developers, admins and tech-savvy people could suggest improvements and new features for PeerTube by publishing and commenting issues in the git repository.

Nowadays, PeerTube is gaining momentum and users. It is getting out of the "experts" bubble, and that's a great opportunity. So we need to know what content creators, video-lovers and non-tech-savvy people miss from PeerTube, what changes or new experiences they would like to get.

We need more diverse feedback, so we want to propose a user-friendly feedback tool:

Here is our feedback tool: Ideas.Joinpeertube.org.

• If you know what would improve your PeerTube experience, please add an idea.
• If you see anything in there that catches your eye, please vote for it.
• If you know people who would like more from PeerTube, please share this feedback tool.

We're but a small non-profit

We had to compromise: Ideas.Joinpeertube.org will only be in English, as we don't have enough humans, talents and energy to maintain a multi-languages feedback tool.

Because at Framasoft (that's the name of our association!), we still are a small French non-profit (10 employees, 36 members) funded through donations. PeerTube is one of our 50+ projects (yes, it's a big one, but still one among many).

We need to collect feedback not only for ourselves, but for everyone who would like to contribute to PeerTube ecosystem (core code, plugins, documentation, indexes, moderation lists, etc.).

By displaying to the world what the PeerTube community wants from PeerTube, we will be able (late 2022 - early 2023) to choose what to add to the roadmap for v6, as long as it's within what we are able and willing to do.

But we also hope that other parties will be interested in contributing to PeerTube by developing awaited and upvoted ideas.

Contribute and share!

Now this tool is in your hands. We trust you will contribute by sharing ideas to improve PeerTube, voting for the ideas you like and sharing this tool to concerned people around you.

As we don't have (and can't afford, and don't want) big marketing tools and communication campaigns, the success of this tool (and of PeerTube) lays exclusively in your hands. We know those are capable hands.

Thanks to all in advance for sharing and caring,
Framasoft

We are pleased to announce this new version of PeerTube!

Editing videos from the web interface, detailed viewers stats for videos, ability to adjust latency during a live broadcast and much more... Let's look around and see what it brings us!

Editing videos from PeerTube web interface

This new feature will delight upstarting videomakers! Until now, there was no options for video editing on PeerTube: videomakers had to edit their videos before publishing them. Now, if you need to do some basic editing, you can do it directly in the web interface.

Once you have uploaded your original video, simply click on the ... menu and select Studio. You can then choose to :

• cut the video (by specifying a new start and/or new end time-code)
• add an intro at the beginning and/or an outro at the end of the video (by uploading a video file)
• add a watermark to the top right corner of the video (by uploading an image)

Once you made these changes, PeerTube will automatically transcode the new video and replace the original one.

This feature has been developed with the financial support of the "Direction du numérique pour l'Éducation du Ministère de l'Éducation Nationale, de la Jeunesse et des Sports" (french Ministry of National Education). It was a request from the team in charge of the apps.education.fr platform, which offers remote working tools to French employees and teachers. Thanks to them!

Stats on videos

Until now, PeerTube offered very few metrics for videos: just a view and a like counter. This 4.2 version provides new metrics for each video:

• average and total watch time
• peak viewers
• number of viewers' origin countries

To access the stats page, click on ... button located under the video player (on the right) and select Stats.

In addition to these counters, PeerTube allows you to view the following data through interactive graphs:

• total viewers
• aggregated watch time
• viewers by country (if the instance's admin have not disabled this option)
• audience retention (to identify the moments in your videos that captured the audience's attention)

This feature has been developed with the financial support of HowlRound Theatre Commons at Emerson College. Thanks to them!

Save replay of permanent/recurring live streaming sessions

As you probably already know, PeerTube offers 2 ways to broadcast a live:

• "normal" live: where you can stream only once
• permanent/recurring live: where you can stream multiples times using the same URL

Until now, only the "normal" live allowed to publish a replay of the livestream. When using permanent/recurring live, it was not possible to automatically record replays. You had to use an external tool to record a streaming session and publish it manually in PeerTube, just like any other video.

Now, it is possible to save each permanent/recurring live streaming session as a replay on a new url. Convenient, isn't it? Replays are automatically filled with all permanent/recurring live information for a better indexation.

This feature has also been developed with the financial support of HowlRound Theatre Commons at Emerson College. Thanks to them!

Latency settings support for lives

Currently, when broadcasting live on PeerTube, the latency (time between when the video stream is sent and when the video is watched) is estimated to be around 30-40 seconds. This is because PeerTube uses a peer-to-peer protocol (P2P) to broadcast videos, lowering the load of their hosts.

In order to change this latency, we offer videomakers two new settings:

• reduced latency, by turning off P2P
• increased latency, to exchange more efficiently video segments with P2P

To change this setting, simply edit the live settings. In the Live settings tab, you can select the latency mode you want.

And also

Thanks to an external contribution, it is now very convenient to edit video subtitles directly from the web interface.

PeerTube also allows instances' administrators to display author avatar in video miniatures on the various pages that list videos (Local Videos for example).

We have made many other improvements in this new version. You can read the whole list on https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md.

Thanks to all PeerTube contributors!
Framasoft

We invite you to discover the improvements and features of this latest version of PeerTube. Let's look around and see what it brings us...

A video player more practical, especially on mobile devices

To make videos watching more enjoyable, especially on mobile devices, we've improved several parts of the video player. Now, when you tap the center of the player, a button is overlayed and allows you to easily play/pause without using the control bar.

We have increased the control bar size (located at the bottom of the player): so that you can now access more easily the play/pause button and the sound, display or speed settings.

For those who watch videos from a mobile device, we have set up an automatic landscape display of videos when you select full screen view. And if you double-tap on the right or left side of the video player, it allows you to move forward / rewind by 10 seconds without using the control bar. Really handy to easily navigate through a video!

Did you notice that when you press the ? key it brings you up the keyboard shortcuts list? This feature has been around for a while, but we haven't highlighted it before. As we have made some fixes, this is a good opportunity to introduce it to you.

An improved plugin system

The improvements we have made to the plugin system allow developers to create new plugins types:

• plugins to create specific pages integrated into PeerTube interface
  Some instances wishing to add other content than the by-default PeerTube pages will now be able to do so without losing the graphical context of PeerTube interface.

• plugins to add fields to the video updating form
  It was already possible to add new description fields to a video via a plugin, but these were visible only in a specific tab ("Plugin Settings"). It is now possible to make these new fields appear in the "Basic Information" tab, which makes them more visible.

As a reminder, instance administrators can enable / disable plugins in the Administration menu, Plugins/Themes tab and you also can discover our plugins selection.

New filters on search results

Now, when you use the search bar of your favorite instance, you can filter the results so that only one type of result is displayed, choosing from videos, channels or playlists. Very useful to find channels or playlists on a specific topic.

More instances customizations

So that PeerTube instances administrators could customize their instance, we now allow them to:

• specify default privacy type on new uploaded videos
  Until now, the privacy type was "public" for any video added. Admins can now decide that all videos uploaded on their instance will be in unlisted / private / internal privacy by default (your choice). Users could change this default choice.

• specify default licence on new uploaded videos
  Before this version, the license field on uploaded videos was not filled in by default. Admins can now choose a default value for this field and apply it to all new uploaded content. Uploaders will then be able to change this default choice.

• disable some features
  As you were so many to ask for it, it is now possible to disable downloading and/or commenting on all your instance videos.

All these changes are to be made in the instance's configuration file.

About peer-to-peer broadcasting

PeerTube uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol to broadcast highly viewed videos (viral videos), lowering the load of their hosts. From now, instance administrators can disable this feature by default. Users (logged in or anonymous) can however re-enable it if they wish.

You can also disable peer-to-peer when you want to embed a video on external web pages. To do this, simply uncheck the P2P box that appears in the Embed tab of the video sharing window.

And also

We have added a configurable login behaviour: if one or more external authentication plugins are installed on an instance, specific buttons will appear below the login form. If only one external authentication plugin has been installed, the instance administrators can enable an automatic redirection of users to the external authentication platform when they click on the login button.

We have made many other improvements in this new version. You can read the whole list on https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md.

Thanks to all PeerTube contributors!
Framasoft

PeerTube v4 is on its way, as we have just published a release candidate version that will be tested out in the next few weeks.

For this occasion, we have published a blog post summing up a year of hard work and improvements on the PeerTube ecosystem. It also presents the new features of PeerTube v4, and what we feel we might work on next year.

• Learn all about those empowering new features on our blog;
• See the code of the release candidate v4 by yourself;
• Support PeerTube by supporting Framasoft, and find out about all our actions.

We would like to thank every person who has contributed to the PeerTube ecosystem throughout the year: y'all are amazing! Our special thanks also goes to NLnet, whose 50 000 € grant funded about two thirds of our 2021 spendings on the PeerTube project. The remaining third came directly from our not-for-profit budget, that comes from grassroots donations (usually from our French audience) we get for all our actions.

If you want to help us fund our work in 2022 on PeerTube and many other projects, please consider supporting Framasoft. And don't forget to share if you care!

We hope you will enjoy PeerTube v4,
Framasoft

PeerTube Live App: being live from your smartphone

ℹ️ This app is for content creators who want to broadcast live from a mobile phone.

Why PeerTube Live App?

PeerTube is the free-libre solution to decentralize and share your videos, but... what if you could broadcast live from your mobile phone, whether it's a conference, a concert or a protest? Live streaming on an independent platform, through an easy to use application, didn't exist yet.

This is a new opportunity. Until now, you could only live stream on PeerTube from your computer https://framablog.org/2021/01/07/peertube-v3-its-a-live-a-liiiiive/... which isn't really convenient when you are in the middle of a crowd!

It's a fact: at Framasoft, we didn't have the skills to develop an Android application. So we looked externally and contacted Schoumi, a contributor to Exodus Privacy, who accepted the project. After initial exchanges in April 2020, it was in May 2021 (the covid slowed us down a bit) that the PeerTube Live app started to be developed. After some improvements, we are now ready to show you the tool.

How do I live stream from my smartphone?

First step: you will need an account on a PeerTube instance that allows live streaming (see the instance's terms and conditions). Then download the PeerTube Live application, available on Google Play store and on the F-Droid app store (Note: this application is only available for Android mobiles).

We advise you to configure the application before going live (at the risk of losing some time choosing the settings - be warned!):

• Add the web address of your instance and the login details of your account on the interface
• Click on the "+" at the top right
• Configure the live settings (Title, channel, privacy settings, resolution, publish a replay of not, etc.)
• To go live, all you have to do now is press the big black button
• The same button lets you end the live stream
• If you have chosen to "Automatically publish a replay when your live stream ends", remember to be patient. The publication delay can vary according to the length of the live, the quality/resolution or the computing power of the server hosting your instance

PeerTube Live App needs you!

There are a few important limitations to point out. First of all, we have done very little testing on the app. In short, the paint is fresh, as they say, so bugs may occur.

Secondly, the application is not developed by Framasoft. Its evolution and improvement depend entirely on... you! You want to contribute to the improvement of the application? Here is how to participate:

• Code of the application (for tech-savvy people): https://codeberg.org/Schoumi/PeerTubeLive
• Help with the translation (you don't need to know how to code!): https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/peertube-live/app/
• Support Schoumi, the developer of PeerTube Live: https://en.liberapay.com/Schoumi/

PeerTube Live Chat: give your instance's audience the ability to chat during live streams

ℹ️ PeerTube Live Chat is a plugin for administrators of a PeerTube instance.

Why PeerTubeLive Chat?

More importantly, why didn't we add a chat feature when we developed the live stream feature for PeerTube? Well, it was a 100% conscious choice to focus only on live stream to begin with (we needed to manage priorities).

However, we soon noticed a developer working on a chat feature (and that was really convenient!): John Livingston. So we offered to co-fund the improvement of his code to make it more user-friendly for the general audience.

The project was launched in April 2021. It was essential that the plugin communicate properly with the PeerTube core code, which meant improving the PeerTube plugin API. After much discussions between Chocobozzz (PeerTube developer) and John, the plugin is ready!

How do you install it?

You need to be an administrator of a PeerTube instance to install the plugin on your server, and follow these steps:

• Prosody Server Installation (version 0.11.9 or later). You can refer to the documentation
• Installation of the "livechat" plugin via the PeerTube administration interface
• Choose in the configuration "Prosody server controlled by PeerTube"

The chat will now be displayed during live video broadcasts.

How do you use it?

Once the plugin is installed on the instance, the audience will be able to chat during the live videos they watch. However, this will only be possible from a computer.

If you are logged in to your PeerTube account, you will be recognized directly by the plugin. If you are not logged in, you can simply enter a nickname.

You will then have direct access to the chat and its features. Moderation can be entrusted to one or more people.

It can always be improved!

As the plugin is very young, there is room for improvement:

• Its installation can be tedious, even cumbersome, depending on certain versions of the software
• We have only tested the tool a little, for the moment
• The interface could be more intuitive.

At the time of writing this news, John Livingston has just received a new €4000 sponsorship from the company Code Lutin to continue his work on PeerTube Live Chat. This is great news for this very useful plugin. We look forward to see it grow.

If you want to support this development, too, please go here: https://liberapay.com/JohnLivingston/. End to contribute to the code, it's there: https://github.com/JohnXLivingston/peertube-plugin-livechat.

Contribute to the contributions

These two tools add great value to PeerTube and our freedom to distribute... livestreams! Their improvement now depends on your contributions.

We are increasingly aware of the richness of the PeerTube ecosystem: clients, plugins... Numerous external contributions offer new options and new freedoms to the community: thank you very much!

If we have been able to finance and support these two external developments, it is partly thanks to the NLnet grant we mentioned when announcing the path to v4 of PeerTube, and partly thanks to your donations which finance all the actions of Framasoft https://support.joinpeertube.org/en/.

Thanks again for your trust!

At Framasoft, as we didn't spend the whole summer basking in the sun, we took time to improve our favourite software. With this version 3.4, we offer you new features to make your PeerTube use more pleasant. Let's look around and see what it brings us...

Filters on every PeerTube pages

We have added a video filtering system on video pages of accounts and channels, but also on common video pages available on each instance (Trending / Recently added / Local videos).

Since v3.2, it was already possible to sort videos display according to several criteria: date of publication, most viewed, most liked, longest, etc. With this new filtering system, you can sort videos according to:

• video language,
• sensitive content level,
• video scope: local videos (from the instance you are on) or federated videos (from the instances you follow),
• video type: live video or VOD - or both,
• video categories.

To do this, just click on the More filters button at the top left of each page where videos are listed and complete the fields. You may have noticed that next to this More filters button, default filters of your account already appear. Look at the screenshot above where filters like Sensitive content: hidden and Scope: Federated are activated. Very useful to find your way around!

Subscribe as an instance to a channel or an account

As a PeerTube instance administrator, you could federate your instance with others to create your own federation bubble. With 3.4, you can follow an account or a channel without necessarily federating with the instance that hosts it.

To do this is very simple: you just have to go to the Administration menu, Federation tab, Following section. The list of instances to which your instance has subscribed appears. If you click on the orange Follow button, you can then manually add channel or account handles. Then, users of your instance will be able to see content published by this channel (or account).

Filter videos search results of an instance

You could already use many filters when searching for videos. Now, you have the possibility to filter videos by indicating a specific instance for which you wish to limit your search. Let's take an example: you search for videos on permaculture and you have identified content on xxxx.xyz instance which have a great editorial work. Enter the instance URL you want to search in the "PeerTube Instance Host" field. You will then only see videos about permaculture available on this instance.

Video Player Update

We have updated the HLS.js library that is used by the PeerTube video player. PeerTube now detects and remembers your bandwidth. Previously, the player used the "medium-quality" by default and you could have noticed a quality change after a few seconds if you had a good network connection. Now, the player automatically identifies your last bandwidth and chooses the most suitable resolution. And if you still want to choose the resolution of the video you are watching, the change is immediate.

And also:

PeerTube 3.4 natively supports saving video files in object-storage systems (s3). Still in beta, this new feature allows PeerTube instance administrators to host videos of their instance with this on-demand storage system. Thus, administrators no longer have to worry about the storage size of their server.

We are still trying to identify performance issues that large PeerTube instances (with many users, videos, viewers or federated with many instances) may hit. If you see any scalability issues with your instance, don't hesitate to explain it to us on our forum.

We have made many other improvements in this new version. You can read the whole list on https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md.

Thanks to all PeerTube contributors!
Framasoft

With this v3.3, we offer you new features to further customise your instances, playlists' addition to the search, smaller URLs and many other things...

Customise your instance's homepage

The great novelty of this 3.3 version is the ability to create a custom homepage for each PeerTube instance. This will allow instance administrators to indicate more clearly what their instance is, what content is available, how to subscribe or propose content selections (non-exhaustive list). The system setup is flexible enough to allow everyone to publish what they want.

To customise your homepage, once you are logged in, simply go to the Administration menu, Configuration section, Homepage tab. There, an empty block allows you to add the elements you want, in Markdown or HTML format. Many elements are available via custom HTML tags created for the occasion. To discover them, do not hesitate to consult our documentation.

This will allow you to display:

• a custom button
• an embed player for videos or playlists
• a video, playlist or channel miniature
• an automatically updated list of videos (with ability to filter by language, category...)

You can also use containers to display elements (videos, channels, accounts, playlists) in a column or in a row and thus offer editorialized selections in an attractive layout.

In order to allow as many people as possible to see your homepage, make sure you set it as the default page. To do this, go to the Administration menu, Configuration section, Basic tab and select "Home" in Landing page field.

These customisation options are now also available in the instance description page (About menu).

Ability to search for playlists

Whether browsing PeerTube or using Sepia Search engine, playlists are now displayed in the search results.

Smaller public URLs

We have been asked a lot about this feature, so we have set up a system to shorten some public URLs. Indeed, the identifiers were a bit long.

From now on, the unique identifier of the video https://peertube2.cpy.re/videos/watch/d10c66b2-8fb2-4fa6-a6e2-bdcb3dab79d2 (36 characters) is shortened to https://peertube2.cpy.re/w/rPdWN4SKgiKWa7LWX3ooMq (22 characters).

And the playlist URL: https://peertube2.cpy.re/videos/watch/playlist/8524e54a-67da-4f78-a296-de844d224952 becomes https://peertube2.cpy.re/w/p/hrAdcvjkMMkHJ28upnoN21.

As you can notice, we have also shortened our URLs syntax: we use /w/ instead of /videos/watch/ and /w/p/ instead of /videos/watch/playlist/. And we have extended this syntax to accounts and channels: /a/ instead of /accounts/ and /c/ instead of /video-channels/.

Of course, the old URLs are still supported.

An adapted interface for RTL (right to left) languages

PeerTube now supports RTL layout if you set PeerTube interface to one of the right to left languages. The menu moves to the right and thumbnails are right justified.

And also:

We have made some changes to improve PeerTube performance. Retrieving information from a video is 2 times faster and we have optimized queries within the federation. We are currently trying to identify performance issues that large PeerTube instances (with many users, videos, viewers or federated with many instances) may hit. If you see any scalability issues with your instance, don't hesitate to explain it to us on our forum.

We also made several changes to PeerTube code so the plugins can add, update or remove links from the left menu. We hope to see new plugins released soon.

We have made many other improvements in this new version. You can read the whole list on https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md.

Thanks to all PeerTube contributors!
Framasoft

2 months ago, we published PeerTube v.3.1! Since then, we have made many improvements to your favourite tool... So here are some details on what this version 3.2 brings you.

Improved differentiation of channels from accounts

During our work with designer Marie-Cécile Godwin, we noticed that it was not easy to differentiate accounts from channels. In order to make it easier for you to find your way around, we have redesigned the appearance of these two element. Channels' avatars (in square format) are now different from accounts' avatars (in circle format).

As you can see on this screenshot, it is now more obvious to identify that you are on a channel page (square avatar and "video channel" indication above the channel title). Thanks to the block placed on the right, you can identify which account manages this channel. If you are curious enough to click on the "view account" button, you will be redirected to a page that lists the account's channels. This page has been redesigned to make it easier to differentiate one channel from another.

We have also added new features to make channels more attractive. For example, you can add an illustration banner and a "support" button to show how people can help you to fund your video creations.

Finally, channels (rather than accounts) are now displayed first on video thumbnails. And we have increased the size of video miniatures by a third, so there are fewer videos displayed on a single line, which is more pleasant.

With these improvements, our hope is that more of you will create channels to post your videos.

New features to improve your use of PeerTube

This version 3.2 is also filled with small improvements and new features that will make your PeerTube experience more pleasant. Not all of them will revolutionize your practice, but we are still very happy to have implemented them.

• First of all, PeerTube now automatically resumes videos for non logged-in users. If you are interrupted while watching, you won't need to look up where you were to continue watching the video.

• PeerTube brings you more robust uploads by using a resumable upload endpoint. Actually, it was quite annoying to have to restart an upload from the beginning (especially if the video was big) when it was interrupted due to a faulty internet connection. You have been pointing this out for a while, and now this problem is history!

• We have changed the default download setting. Previously, when you clicked on the "Download" button, the torrent download was set by default. Now it is direct download. But of course you can always change this setting.

• When you have uploaded many videos on your account, it is sometimes not easy to find them. So we've added the ability to sort videos according to several criteria: publication date, most viewed, most liked, longest, etc. You can also display only your live broadcasts.

• To facilitate instance administration, we have added a notification to notify administrators on new available PeerTube version and plugins updates. This way, we hope that more instances will be kept up to date.

Improvements on the video player context menu

Did you notice that when you right-click in the video player, you can display a contextual menu? This feature has been around for a while, but it wasn't highlighted. And since we've just improved this menu, this is a good opportunity to introduce this feature to those who haven't seen it yet!

We added small icons to easily understand available actions. There is a new "stats for nerds" item which displays, as the name suggests, technical information that only the most experienced geeks will understand ;)

We have made many other improvements in this new version. You can read the whole list on https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md.

Thanks to all PeerTube contributors!
Framasoft

We are glad to announce that a big part of PeerTube v4 will be funded through an NLnet grant under their "Search and discovery" program (find here their page on PeerTube).

We plan to develop PeerTube's v4 all along 2021, with our main focus on customizing the experience so that instance administrators, content creators and users can display and discover the videos to their liking.

We truly believe that empowering instance administrators and content creators to customize their instances and channels is a great way forward to help PeerTube users to find and identify the videos they want to watch.

Such customization will have a direct impact on search, and on search results. Moreover we plan to extend the search scope to playlists so they can be displayed in search results. We also plan to improve search result pages with a more ubiquitous sorting/filter system and a better interface.

PeerTube's v4 main features

Here are the main "customization" features we plan to be working on:

• Sorting/filter system on pages that list videos
• Customize left menu for instances (through plugin API)
• Customize homepage for instances (through a markup system)
• Customize channels for content creators
• Incentives to complete instance/channel attributes (i.e. descriptions, images, terms of service, etc.)

We also plan to work on frequently asked improvements such as:

• Adding playlists to search scope (on PeerTube instance and Sepia Search)
• Subscription to channels/accounts from an instance
• Coordination with, support and contributions to external developments (clients, plugin, etc.)

More details on our plans can be found on the PeerTube Github page. Please note that these are the main features and developments. They can evolve due to circumstances, contributions, timings, etc. To be informed of any change, subscribe to PeerTube newsletter.

Managing expectations

This is already a lot, and we can't wait to implement those features!

That being said, we understand that lots of people have lots of expectations for PeerTube. But we won't uphold and develop them all, as we are not a tech giant, not even a startup.

Framasoft is a small French not for profit of 35 members, and has made the choice not to overgrow. We want to stay at 10 employees tops, even though we manage more than 80 different projects (OK, PeerTube is one the biggest ones, but it is still one of eighty projects).

We have only one developer dedicated to PeerTube (not even full time), helped by others in our team (design, administration, communication, etc.). Maintaining PeerTube means lots of different tasks (learn more about it here in our FAQ), and we don't want him (or anyone else, for that matter) to burn himself out to fulfill everyone's expectations.

So if our plans for 2021 and PeerTube's v4 don't match your priorities, that's completely OK, but we won't do more nor go faster. Remember that you are free to fork PeerTube to lead it in another direction, or to contribute by coding plugins and issues (get started on contributing here).

Thanks for the support

We really want to thank the PeerTube community for its work and support. We also want to thank NLnet for their grant that will fund the major part of our work on PeerTube this year, thus relieving us from having to organize a dedicated crowdfunding in 2021.

While most of our roadmap for PeerTube is covered by NLnet's donation, the rest will come from our own budget. Framasoft is funded by grassroots supporters who give us money for all our actions and projects.

If you want to support PeerTube, you can support Framasoft with a donation, but also by helping others to discover and learn more about PeerTube and our projects: sharing is caring!

After releasing PeerTube v3 in early January, it's time for a new main version with plenty of improvements and new features. Here are some explanations on what this v3.1 brings us.

Better transcoding features

Transcoding? It's the process of converting an audio or video file from one encoding format to another so media files can be visible on different platforms and devices. On PeerTube, we use the FFmpeg program to transcode the videos you upload. You probably have noticed the warning message when you post a video saying "This video is being transcoded, it may not work properly yet". In fact, until transcoding is complete, your video may not be seen from all your devices.

Until now, transcoding rules were the same for every PeerTube instance: you couldn't modify them. From this v3.1, you can create transcoding profiles by installing plugins on instances. Instance administrators can select a transcoding profile adapted to their needs after installing a plugin. We hope many of them will create such plugins to customize their FFmpeg settings.

For example, you can now create a specific transcoding profile that highlights live videos (over other videos) in terms of bandwidth. In addition, the administrator of a PeerTube instance specialized in broadcasting musical contents will be happy to know he can create a high quality audio profile.

This v3.1 also changes the way transcoding tasks are managed. Before, and for each instance, transcoding occured chronologically as users were uploading videos. Thus when a video maker was uploading several videos in a row, he prevented video transcoding from other users of the instance. Therefore we have modified the priority management system for these transcoding jobs so that when a user upload several files at the same time, the transcoding of some of his videos is de-prioritized (they are on standby) if another user upload a file. In other words, administrators can give an higher priority to optimize jobs and can decrease priority of transcoding jobs depending on the amount of videos uploaded by the user in the last 7 days. This prevents one single user from blocking other people's contents' uplaods: it's more fair. Besides, administrators can now see the progress of video transcoding in the list of on-going jobs on their instance.

Finally, instance administrators can now choose how many simultaneous transcoding jobs they support. Of course, transcoding several videos at once requires an important computing power. If you want to allow the transcoding of more than one video at once on your instance, make sure you have the proper hardware.

More and more pleasant interfaces

As we know that PeerTube interface is not always easy to understand, we still improve it so that everyone feels comfortable using this tool.

The disappearance of the "most liked" category, in the left menu, is the most visible change. In return, we added to the "trending" category 3 options for sorting videos:

• hot: a selection of recent videos with the most interactions
• views: videos with the most views in the last 24 hours
• likes: the most liked videos

We have modified some elements in the Administration menu (available for instance administrators only). For example in the "users" tab, the "Create user" button is now on the left side to be more visible. Also administrators can now customize the value of video quota (total and daily) of each user.

And also:

You can now easily subscribe to an account hosted on a different instance from the one you have registered on (remote account) by clicking on the "subscribe" button under a video and then by entering your PeerTube ID (username@domain).

Instance administrators can now choose how many simultaneous import jobs they support (whether these imports are realized through a URL or a torrent). This prevents big instances from having long waiting lists.

Finally, we have also implemented a system of async torrent creation on video upload in order to fix some upload errors bugs.

We have made many other improvements in this new version. You can read the whole list (in English) on https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md.

{{ $gettext('Thanks to all PeerTube contributors!') }}
Framasoft

In September 2019 when PeerTube v.1.4 was released, we announced the creation of a plugin system. This system allows PeerTube instance administrators to create and/or install plugins depending on their specific feature needs, without having to rely on our small non-profit for this creative work.

Did you know that there are now more than 40 plugins available for PeerTube instance administrators?

To support the installation of these plugins, we have just created a new page in which we will often highlight a plugin selection. Thus we hope that more and more instance administrators will install them to improve their instance features.

We first have chosen to highlight 4 plugins:

• video-annotation to add annotations to a video;
• upload-limits to alert on the upload-limits;
• chapters to add chapters to a video;
• glavliiit to help with the moderation.

We will regularly add other plugins to this selection. Have a good discovery!

It has been a very busy 6 months, but we have completed our roadmap and just released version 3 of PeerTube!

• Read all about it on our blog;
• See the code release by yourself;
• Watch the "PeerTube, Backstage" short-film (in French, subtitles incoming).

We would like to thank every person who has contributed to the fundraising of the v3 for their generosity (especially in a difficult time for everyone). Thanks also to the sponsors of this v3, Octopuce, Code Lutin and the Debian project. Last but not least, our deepest thanks to every person who, in their own way, worked and contributed to help this v3 get complete.

Happy free-libre live streams,
Framasoft.

PeerTube v3 is almost complete, and we have just published a RC (release candidate) for admins who like to try it and give us feedback so we can publish a beautiful v3 in early January.

A barebone yet functioning p2p live streaming

The big feature of this v3 will be live streaming, and we're proud to say that it works fine! 🎉🎉🎉

We've had lots of tests and feedback from pioneers (shout out to Le Canard Réfractaire for their help), and we are now confident that a PeerTube p2p live stream can scale up to hundreds of simultaneous users (but not thousands - not yet).

In the different tests we've had, we have managed to keep lag between 30s to 1mn. To our knowledge, peer-to-peer live broadcasting will induce an incompressible lag between the streamer and the audience. Ultimately, this lag will depend on the server charge (how many live streams are happening at the same time) and bandwidth.

We encourage admins to enable live transcoding for live streaming. Even though it will take processing power and induce some lag, it is really essential to facilitate the experience both for streamers (who can use basic OBS settings) and for viewers (who can watch in their preferred video resolution).

With this v3, admins will have the option to enable live streaming, for which they can set a maximum number of ongoing and awaiting live streams (per user and for the whole instance). They will also be able to set up a maximum duration limit for live streams.

Two ways to set up your live

As you can see in our how to go live documentation, PeerTube streamers will need a broadcasting software (we recommend the Free-Libre software OBS), and use the live RTMP key.

Setting up a new livestream is like uploading a new video. The default setting will get you one PeerTube URL, one video container (with description and thumbnail and tags...), and one RTMP Key for each of your livestreams. This setting is useful if you want to host multiple lives simultaneously on you channel. When your live is finished, it will be replaced by the replay (if both the instance admin and the content creator have activated this setting).

Streamers will also have the option to enable "permanent live". It will work more like Twitch does: your permanent live URL and video container will correspond to a single RTMP key. You can go live and stop it whenever you want, the live will be broadcast on the same URL. This setting does not allow saving a video for replay, though.

There is more than live in life

This v3 comes packed with many changes and improvements.

The sidebar menu has been completely reworked, thanks to the UX design work we did with Marie Cécile Paccard. It is now way easyier to interact with you profile or to distinguish pages displaying what's in your Library from what's on your instance federation bubble.

Notifications have been improved: now, when an account has been muted (either by a user or an admin) the notification of their actions are deleted, which comes really handy when someone is having an activity peak and you d'ont want to clean your notifications one by one ;).

Administrators and moderators have, once again, usefull new tools in this update. There's a new page to facilitate comment moderation, batch actions, the option to delete all comments of an account, or to see unlisted videos uploaded by an account on the instance you moderate.

Warning: fresh paint

There is still a lot to tell about this v3, and people who contributed to make it happen. That's a good thing, because we will talk about it in January, for the v3 release post.

We just wanted to describe briefly what you could expect from this new PeerTube version, and present you our progress with this release candidate.

In the meantime, if you try and test Peertube v3 RC and its live feature, please be sure to give us some feedback on the code respository issues or on our forum.

{{ $gettext('Have a great holydays and stay safe,') }}
Framasoft

We have just released SepiaSearch, our search engine to help you discover videos and channels on PeerTube!

We've worked hard to ensure that this engine respects your data, your attention and your freedoms.

• Learn more on the Framablog
• Use SepiaSearch
• Copy and adapt the code, to make your own PeerTube search engine.

Please remember to share the roadmap to v3 page, where people can learn more about (and support) ou plans for PeerTube.

Thanks to all PeerTube contributors!
Framasoft

In mid-july, we released PeerTube 2.3 and now here is the 2.4 version. This latest release implements features we've already told you about in the last news as we still follow our roadmap. Let us present you in details our latest innovations!

More efficient moderation tools

It was already possible to report videos, and now you can also report accounts and comments. It's very simple to inform moderators of an instance about a problematic account. Go to the account page, click on the 3 horizontal dots on the right of the profile name, and select Report this account. A window will appear in which you can indicate the issue encountered and/or describe it. In the same way, it is now easy to report a comment: click on the Options menu under the comment you wish to report and select Report this comment.

Reports are also sent to moderators of the instance where the reported item (video, account or comment) is hosted. They are displayed in the Administration menu - Moderation tab - Reports page. The new video player on this page makes it easier to accept or reject a report. Moderators can also send messages to local accounts (registered on the same instance) that made reports: they just have to go to the column Messages and click on the little bubble.

Users who report an item are notified when their report status changed (accepted/rejected) and when they get a message from moderators. They can see the list of reports they made in Account Settings - Misc tab - My Abuse Reports page. In this page, you can send a message to your instance moderators by clicking on the bubble-shaped icon in the Messages column.

Playlist system improved

If it was easy to embed a PeerTube video on a website or to share it on social media, it wasn't possible to embed playlists. So we worked on their integration on third party websites. It's now very easy to share playlists with the embed code:

PeerTube's playlists already allow you to list just one clip of a video (and not the whole video), but they did not allow you to include several clips of one video in the same playlist. It is now possible and really simple: go on the page of the video, click on the Save button under the video, tick a playlist and then click on the + icon next to the playlist name. An additional field will allow you to enter different time-codes you wish to add. Playlists can be very useful remix tools, e.g. for educational purposes.

An annotation PeerTube plugin

This annotation PeerTube plugin allows you to display information in the player at a given time of a video. To do so, once the plugin is installed on the instance, you just have to go on the uploaded video information page, open the Plugin settings tab and then add your annotations and their time code. The placement of the annotations is in the player top right corner by default, but you can choose other locations. The annotations format must respect specific rules:

• start: when to show the annotation
• stop: when to hide the annotation
• options: set options for your annotation (e.g. position)
• HTML: content of your annotation (in html)

This may give for example:

More pleasant and accessible interfaces

We made many improvements to the PeerTube interface in this new release. We would like to take this opportunity to thanks two contributors, @Kimsible and @Rigelk, who developed/improved the following components.

The comment window composer has been improved: there is now a small button indicating that you can use the Markdown format. A delete/rewrite feature on comments with no replies, that we already know from other software in the fediverse like Mastodon, has also been implemented.

The administration menu of an instance is clearer. When one of the tabs of this menu bar is open, the other tabs are grayed out, which helps you to find your way around more easily. In the Users tab, the users' table layout has been modified: the action button is now on the left, to facilitate management on mobile devices, the video quota is now displayed as a progress bar and the role of each user is immediately recognizable with the use of different colors.

We have also improved the video edition form (that you can access when you upload or update a video). The menu to select the channel now displays the channel icon and the language selector displays the language currently set by the instance on top of the list. Finally, the privacy selector provides a clearer description of the available choices.

And also:

We have also improved PeerTube performances: loading an instance's interface for the first time is now faster. We also have fixed a few bugs on the player that were reported to us.

This new release includes many other improvements. You can see the complete list on https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md.

In other news, we are going to change the moderation policy of the public instances index we maintain on https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances. The new moderation terms are stated in the header and will take effect on Monday September, 21.

Thanks to all PeerTube contributors!
Framasoft

Moderation tools: on the road to 2.4

In early August we finalized the work on the moderation tools: accounts and comments reporting, improving the administration and moderation interface, reporting logs, messages between the moderation team and the reporter…

We will talk more about these tools when we will announce the 2.4 update which is currently in the testing and bugfixing phase.

There is also a new plugin that allows to silence or block a list of predefined instances: our thanks to those who have started to create, publish and share their blocking lists, we hope that this kind of initiatives will multiply!

Playlists, plugins…

As planned, during August and September, we will work to improve the playlists and plugins systems. First, we will work on the embedding of playlists so that they can be shared online.

PeerTube's playlists already allow you to list just one clip of a video (and not the whole video), which can be very useful (especially for educational purposes), but they do not yet allow you to include several clips of one video in the same playlist, so we want to remedy this.

We've already developed several plugins in the last few weeks, which in many cases increases the possibilities of interaction between the plugins and the core PeerTube software. We're going to continue along this path, by creating an annotation plugin, which allows you to display information at a given point in a video.

By the way, if you have created a plugin for PeerTube, feel free to tell us about it on our contributions forum: we are in the process of making a selection to highlight it on JoinPeertube.org.

The next two months will be even busier!

The work in progress on the PeerTube experience is going well: several interviews have been conducted, and our designer will soon be sending us summaries with her recommendations. In addition, we are planning to work together on the menus organization, but don't be impatient! This is an in-depth work and the results may only be visible in a few months 😉.

Finally, we had many feedbacks following the release of version 2.3 presenting the global search features. We feel that an important tool is missing: an independent website for the search engine that indexes PeerTube videos.

So we plan to take some time from this third stage of development to create such a web interface and put it online. Of course, this code will be free so that others can publish their PeerTube search page with their own choice of instances to index.

We need your help: please share!

After a dazzling start (thanks to you all), the progressive fundraising for this roadmap has slowed down a lot. Currently, we are halfway through the €60,000 needed to finance these six months of development. Concretely, this means that from the beginning of September, we will finance the progress towards v3 on our own 2020 budget.

So we need your help to share the roadmap around you, and get the word out about PeerTube. Feel free to share this project in your blogs, vlogs, podcasts: some of you have already done so, and it helps us a lot (plus it really warms our free-software-lovers' hearts)!

We count on you to share the roadmap: https://joinpeertube.org/roadmap

In early june, we released PeerTube 2.2 and less than two months later we are releasing this 2.3 version. We are proud to move forward so fast on PeerTube development! As we continue to follow our roadmap, this release incorporates the features we told you about in the latest news. Let's look around and see what it brings us...

Global video search is now available

Roadmap step 1, the video search on the entire vidiverse is now accessible to everyone. By creating this index engine (a tool to index all videos and channels of predefined PeerTube instances), we are now allowing instances administrators to set the search bar of their instance to search on the entire (or a portion of) the vidiverse.

For more details about this feature, please read our explanations on https://joinpeertube.org/news#roadmap-v3-part-1-find-videos-global-search.

Information banners on instances

Broadcast message system that allows instances administrators to display information to people who visit it is now active. This is a handy feature to indicate that your instance will be in maintenance on a certain day and that the service might be disrupted... or anything else!

We give you the possibility to display 3 different types of messages:

• info: blue text on light blue background
• warning: brown text on light yellow background
• error: red text on light red background

Many improvements on accessibility

Caroline Chuong (@Pandoraaa), consultant at Octo Technology has proposed several contributions to improve PeerTube accessibility. These contributions are essential to bring PeerTube's interfaces accessible to everyone. And as we are aware not being accessibility experts, we are really delighted that contributors give us a hand on this aspect. A big thank to Caroline for her contributions.

New features on content moderation

As indicated in our roadmap, we have spent time improving and adding moderation tools. PeerTube 2.3 includes the ability for instances administrators to delete all comments from a fediverse account with a single click. It is also possible to mute an account directly from a video thumbnail.

In terms of interface, the video report window has been greatly improved by @rigelk. As a reminder, the video reporting feature is accessible if you have an account and are logged in. It is therefore only possible to report videos that you see from the instance where you are registered: either because this video is hosted on your instance, or because your instance is federated to the instance where the video was uploaded.

This new video report window now includes a checklist of possible reasons for the report and offers you a free writing field to specify your report if necessary.

Plugins to block or mute instances

The auto-mute plugin allows to automatically hide accounts and instances from a public list while the videos-auto-block plugin can automatically block videos from a public list.

We haven't yet identified any PeerTube instance administrator who use these plugins and generate a public list. But if there is, please let us know on our forum.

And also:

PeerTube is now available in 2 new languages: Vietnamese and Kabyle!

This new release includes many other improvements. You can see the complete list on https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md.

Thanks to all PeerTube contributors!
Framasoft

Find videos more easily with the global search

Thanks to your support we've been able to develop the system of global video search on PeerTube during June. We have published a tool which index all videos and channels from all PeerTube instances listed on the public directory.

This index engine code is under FLOSS license so that anyone can host their own index engine and set their own eligibility rules. As an example, if you want to set up a search interface that only allows you to search for videos hosted on instances dedicated to video games, you will just have to create a list including all instances URLs you have selected and put it online. So that the index engine can refer to it and return you the appropriate results.

In the next version of the software, each PeerTube instance administrator will be able to choose to use one of these index engines to allow specific searches in the search bar of its instance.

This index engine has common features with the PeerTube search engine (API). So, you could use this global search system in two different ways: by creating a dedicated web interface for it or by integrating it on a PeerTube instance search. We will give you more details on this feature on mid-July when we will publish the 2.3 release.

But that's not all!

In the last few months, we have created 2 new plugins:

• peertube-plugin-auto-mute, which allows to automatically hide accounts and instances according to a public list;
• peertube-plugin-auto-block-videos, which allows to automatically block videos from a public list.

We haven't yet identified any PeerTube instance administrator who use these plugins and generate a public list. So we are requesting the community to create these lists on our forum.

Meanwhile, we have developed an information message system which allow PeerTube instance administrators to display information to people who visit it. This is very handy to indicate that your instance will be in maintenance on a certain day at a certain time and that the service may be disrupted.

July: spending time on moderation tools

As announced in the roadmap, the upcoming weeks will be dedicated to improve and add moderation tools. As each new version of PeerTube has added new moderation features, there is still a lot of work to be done to facilitate contents and accounts management in the fediverse. That's why we will take several weeks of development exclusively on this topic.

PeerTube 2.2 version already features improvements on video reporting interface, such as search filters, quick actions on videos and accounts, video thumbnails, quick access to embed, etc.

During July we will continue to develop features such as:

• comments moderation
• moderation reports linked to an account
• moderation history
• returns on actions taken (or not) following a report
• fight against spam.

This list isn't exhaustive and it's possible that we may include other developments, depending on feedback from the community.

We still need your support

After a boom start during the first few weeks, this rising funds campaign is now stagnating at just over €27,000. So we still need your support to finance the third step of development (dedicated to plugins and playlists) which will start in August. Also, feel free to share the roadmap around you.

After showcasing our roadmap for PeerTube V3, we are happy to announce that version 2.2 is out. Let's look around and see what it brings us...

Many improvements interface-wise

Version 2.2 includes many improvements to make PeerTube's interfaces more pleasant to use. The most visible improvement is definitely the search bar. Located in the top right, this search bar now offers indications to make an efficient search. For instance, you can search for a channel with its name but also by using the @channel_id@domain form.

When you want to download a video on PeerTube (to do this, you just need to click on the three horizontal dots located in the menu under the video, and select Download), a window now shows detailed information about the file. This new feature is only active for videos uploaded after the release of version 2.2.

Users who aren't logged in now have a Settings button in the left menu that will let them customize how they use PeerTube:

• using P2P or not
• displaying sensitive video thumbnails or not
• filtering videos based on language
• choosing an interface theme
• activating automatic video playback or not

Another very convenient improvement: you can now drag and drop to upload a video file. No need to click "Select file" anymore, you only need to use your mouse, touchpad or fingers to drag and drop your video file from your hard drive.

Video imports via URL have been improved: you can now import subtitles and even get the video license and language. Quite useful when you want to duplicate a video from another PeerTube instance while keeping all the metadata.

We already offered a markdown editor to, for instance, format text in the Description field when you upload a video. We have improved upon this editor to make it more clear, and we added a fullscreen mode.

PeerTube also allows you to import audio files. Quite a nice feature to share musical arrangements or podcasts without having to make a clip. When you upload the audio file, it is even possible to add an illustrative picture that will be fused with the file. However, be careful because the picture you choose will be definitive and you will not be able to change it.

As the administrator of an instance, you will have acces to a new interface to manage duplicated videos via the redundancy system. You can now see a list of the videos from your instance that have duplicated onto other instances. But most importantly, we now show you a list of videos you have duplicated and we show you how much space they take with graphs (aren't our pie charts pretty?).

The video abuses management interface has also been improved: we added research filters, quick actions you can take regarding videos and accounts, video thumbnails in the chart, quick access to embed, etc.

The majority of these improvements have come to be thanks to external contribution from @rigelk et @kimsible. Big thanks to the two of them!

New plugins for varied experiences

In this new version, we have made it possible for plugins to define external authentication methods and developed 3 authentication plugins:

• LDAP
• OpenID
• SAMLv2

Thus, it is now possible to authenticate users via an external server (OpenID or SAMLv2 compatible) or via an LDAP directory. This work was made possible thanks to funding from the "Direction du Numérique pour l'Éducation du Ministère de l'Éducation et de la Jeunesse" (France).

We also added some hooks (entry points towards actions lists) to the plugins system, which will allow developers to create new plugins dedicated to moderation:

• deleting a video
• validating a URL/torrent import
• ability to hide/unhide an instance or an account
• blacklisting or unblacklisting a video

From these additions a plugin was born, still in testing to this day: peertube-plugin-auto-mute,which allows you to automatically hide accounts and instances depending on a public list. If you want other admins to be able to use your public list of accounts and instances to hide, do not hesitate to make a pull request on the plugin's README.

And also:

This v2 adds HTML support (on top of text mode) in emails sent by PeerTube, making them less austere and avoiding bugs where links would get shortened.

The admin of a PeerTube instance can choose to auto follow other instances. Before, the majority of admins used this feature to automatically follow all the instances in the public index (which causes moderation issues). It is now possible for anyone to share a list of instances (on github, gitlab, pastebin, etc.) so that the admins of a PeerTube instance can use that list's web address to make their instance automatically follow the instances of that shared list. This lets users create auto follow lists within small groups.

And finally, we improved the embed API, allowing websites that embed a PeerTube video to have better control over the player:knowing the video's length, knowing when playback is over, exporting video subtitles, indicating a specific subtitle to activate. More info on https://docs.joinpeertube.org/#/api-embed-player.

This new release includes many other improvements. You can see the complete list (in English) on https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md.

Thanks to all those who contribute to PeerTube!
Framasoft.

• global search
• moderation tools
• plugin & playlists
• peer-to-peer live streaming

Please read our blogpost to learn more about our choices for the next 6 months of development.

This PeerTube v3 should be published on november, 2020.

In the meantime,we hope you will share and support this new JoinPeertube roadmap.

Freely,
Framasoft

A few months after PeerTube V2 announcement, we are pleased to announce you that version 2.1 has been released. Here's a quick overview of the features it brings…

An even more pleasant interface

We are continually striving to improve PeerTube's interface by collecting users opinions so that we know what is causing them trouble (in terms of understanding and usability for example). Firstly, even if it's no big deal, we have added a small animation on the videos when you play and pause them. We really like this little development! We also worked on the different icons graphics on the video viewing page. The icons and buttons are now more refined and you can also see the icons I like / I don't like without being connected. It provides users to understand how they can interact with the video.

When you are logged in and put your mouse on videos' thumbnails, a small clock-shaped icon appears in the thumbnail's upper right corner to display Watch Later. Click it to add the video to your Watch Later playlist.

We also improved the contents' layout of PeerTube presentation page located in About category / PeerTube tab. On this page, you now have easy access to PeerTube documentation, to the various apps available and to the PeerTube Contribution Guide.

An enhanced documentation

We are aware that documenting software allows more people to use it. That's why we added many contents to the PeerTube documentation. PeerTube's administrators can now find information on how to use remote storage, how to manage videos' redundancy between instances and how to use PeerTube logs to understand what happens on their instances. We also added information on the various available features to customize an instance's interface, on moderation tools and how to mute instances or accounts.

Because providing a video player easily integrated into any web environment is essential for us, PeerTube now provides a library for developers to control the integration of a video player via the PeerTube Embed API.

Developments on comments

Interactivity with users is one of the recipes to success on videos platforms. Interacting with Internet users and responding to comments helps content producers to build an audience. That's why this latest version includes enhancements that help video makers to interact more with their viewers.

First, the comments' graphic layout has been modified: it is now easier to find your way between original comments and answers. Avatars' visuals placed next to each user name have been improved and the display name (and its identifier) are now more readable. When a video maker responds to a comment on one of his videos, it is easier to identify him or her because his name is highlighted.

It is now possible to display comments according to 2 criteria: the most recent first (default display) or most replies first.

Another news: you can now write comments in Markdown language in a restricted syntax.

Finally, we added an Options menu underneath users' comments to mute an account or an instance very easily.

More features

As some of you asked us, we added a new privacy mode. You can now choose to broadcast a video in internal mode: the video is available only for connected users to the instance on which the video is uploaded. This feature allows a video to be watched only by a group of friends, family or work.

PeerTube now automatically generates hyperlinks when a time code is mentioned in the video description or comments. Handy for mentioning a part of the video or making a chapter in the description!

Finally, the collaborative translation of PeerTube's contents is now done using Weblate, which is much more powerful and pleasant to use than the tool we we're using until now (Zanata).

This new release includes many other improvements. You can see the complete list on https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/releases/tag/v2.1.0

Thanks to all PeerTube contributors!
Framasoft

After a year of work and improvements, we have just released version 2 of PeerTube! Everything is explained in detail in the Framablog article that we invite you to read.

We present, among other things:

• features and improvements since v1 of November 2018
• work to facilitate the federation and presentation of proceedings
• the new version of JoinPeertube, which is enriched by this work
• PeerTube's official documentation site (administration and use)
• our desires and projects for the future of PeerTube (we are considering a new crowdfunding, and dreaming of a video-remix tool and of live streaming!)

These improvements are the result of the many contributions of the members of the PeerTube community (thank you!), but also of a year of work that we have financed through donations that support all of our association's projects, currently in a donation campaign.

Freely,
Framasoft.

Peertube 1.4 just came out! Here's a quick overview of what's new…

Plug-in system

Since PeerTube's launch, we have been aware that every administrator and user wishes to see the software fulfill their needs. As Framasoft cannot and will not develop every feature that could be hoped for, we have from the start of the project planned on creating a plug-in system.

We are pleased to announce that the foundation stones of this system have been laid in this 1.4 release! It might be very basic for now, but we plan on improving it bit by bit in Peertube's future releases.

Now, this system allows each administrator to create specific plug-ins depending on their needs. They may install extensions created by other people on their instance as well. For example, it is now possible to install community created graphical themes to change the instance visual interface.

A better interface

We strive to improve PeerTube's interface by collecting users' opinions so that we know what is causing them trouble (in terms of understanding and usability for example). Even though this is a time-consuming undertaking, this new release already offers you a few modifications.

First of all, we realized that most people who discover PeerTube have a hard time understanding the difference between a channel and an account. Indeed, on others video broadcasting services (such as YouTube) these two things are pretty much the same.

However, on PeerTube each account is linked to one or multiple channels that can be named as the users sees fit. You also have to create at least one channel when creating an account. Once the channels have been created, users can upload videos to each channel to organize their contents (for example, you could have a channel about cooking and another one about biking).

In order to make this channel idea more understandable, we have changed the sign-up form, which from now on consists of two steps:

• Step 1: account creation (choosing your username, password, email, etc.)
• Step 2: choosing your default channel name via a new form

• We also aimed to differentiate a channel homepage from that of an account. These two pages used to list videos, whereas now the account homepage lists all the channel linked to the account by showing under each channel name the thumbnail from the last videos uploaded on it.
• Another unclear element was the video sharing pop-up. We have improved it, and it is now possible to share or embed a video by making it start and/or finish at a precise moment (time-code feature), to decide which subtitles will appear by default, and to loop the video. These new options will surely be greatly enjoyed.

More features

Our wonderful community of translators is once again to thank for their work, after they enriched PeerTube with 3 new languages: Finnish, Greek and Scottish Gaelic, making PeerTube now available in 22 languages.

We also added a new feature allowing you to upload an audio file directly to PeerTube: the software will automatically create a video from the audio file. This much awaited for feature should make life easier for music makers :)

This new release includes many other improvements. You can see the complete list on https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/releases/tag/v1.4.0.

Thanks to all PeerTube contributors!
Framasoft

We've just released PeerTube 1.3 and it brings a lot of new features.

The most important of these new features is the playlist system. This feature allows any user to create a playlist in which it's possible to add videos and reorder them. Videos added to a playlist can be viewed entirely or partially: the creator of the playlist can decide when the video playback starts and/or ends (timecode system). This system is really useful to create all kinds of zappings or educational contents by selecting extracts from videos which interest you. In addition, a "Watch Later" playlist is created by default for each user. Thus, you can save videos in this playlist when you don't have time to watch them immediately.

Another feature of this 1.3 version has been entirely developed by an external contributor: Josh Morel who add a quarantine system for videos on PeerTube. If the administrator of an instance enables this feature, any new video uploaded on his instance will automatically be hidden until a moderator approves it.

PeerTube translation community have done a huge job. 3 new languages are now available: Japanese, Dutch and European Portuguese (PeerTube already support Brazilian Portuguese). Amazing! PeerTube is now available in 19 languages!

Now, administrators can manage more finely how other instances subscribe to their own instance. The administrator can decide whether or not to approve the subscription of another instance to its own. It is also possible to activate automatic rejection for any new subscription to its instance. Finally, a notification is created as soon as the administrator's instance receives a new subscription. These features help administrators control on which instances their content is displayed.

We're also redesigning the PeerTube video player to offer better video playback and to correct a few bugs. With this new player, resolution changes should be smoother and the bandwidth management is optimized with a more efficient buffering system. Version 1.3 of PeerTube also adds ability for administrators to enable this new experimental player so we can get feedback on it. We hope to use this new player by default in the future.

Finally, we have made some adjustments to the user interface so it easier and nicer to use. For instance, video thumbnails are becoming bigger so that they're more highlighted. Users now have a quick access to their library from the menu that includes their playlists, videos, video watching history and their subscriptions.

Many other improvements have been made in this new version. You can see the complete list on https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/releases/tag/v1.3.0.

Thanks to all PeerTube contributors!
Framasoft

Here is a small retrospective of the end of 2018/beginning of 2019:

In December 2018, we released version 1.1 which contained some moderation tools requested by instance administrators.

We also took the opportunity to add a watched videos history feature and the automatic resuming of video playback.</

In January, we released version 1.2 that supports 3 new languages: Russian, Polish and Italian. Thanks to PeerTube's community of translators, PeerTube is now translated into 16 different languages!

This version also includes a notification system that allows users to be informed (on the web interface or through email) when their video is commented, when someone mention them, when one of their subscriptions has published a new video, etc.

In the meantime, the PeerTube federation has grown: today, more than 300 instances broadcast more than 70,000 videos, with nearly 2 million cumulated views. We remind you that the only official website we maintain around PeerTube is https://joinpeertube.org/en and that we bear no responsibility on any other site that may be published.

As you can see, we have gone far beyond what the crowdfunding has funded. And we will continue!

For 2019, we plan to add a plugin and theme management system (even though basic at first), playlist management, support for audio files upload and many other features.

If you also to contribute to the growing of PeerTube, you can participate in its funding here: https://support.joinpeertube.org/en

If you have any questions, feel free to use our forum: https://framacolibri.org/c/peertube

Thanks to all PeerTube contributors!
Framasoft

We are now in mid-October! As promised, we have just released the first stable version of PeerTube.

It implements all stretch goals we planned in our crowdfunding:

• Localization support (as we write these lines, PeerTube is already available in 13 different languages!)
• Subtitles support
• Ability to import videos through an URL (YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and many others!)
• Ability to import a video through a torrent file or a magnet URI
• RSS feeds, allowing you to track new videos published in all federated PeerTube instances, in a specific PeerTube instance or in a video channel you like. You can also subscribe to comment feeds!
• A more relevant search, with the ability to set advanced filters (duration, category, tags...)
• Subscriptions throughout the federation: you can follow your favorite video channels and see all the videos on a dedicated page
• Redundancy system: a PeerTube instance can help sharing some videos from another instance

We know that feature descriptions are not very amusing, so we have published a few demonstration videos:

• RSS Feeds
• Torrent import
• YouTube video import
• Adding subtitles
• Advanced search
• Video channel subscriptions

This is the last newsletter regarding the PeerTube crowdfunding. We would like to thank you one more time, for allowing us to greatly improve PeerTube, and therefore to promote a more decentralized web. But the journey does not end here: we will continue to work on the software, and there is still a lot to do to fully free up video streaming. But before anything, we'll take a few days off ;)

We remind you that you can ask questions on the PeerTube forum. You can also contact us directly on https://contact.framasoft.org.

Cheers,
Framasoft

A month before the version 1 of PeerTube, we would like to share some (good!) news with you.

We just released PeerTube beta 12, that allows to subscribe to video channels, whether they are on your instance or even on remote instances. This way, you can browse videos of your subscribed channels in a dedicated page. Moreover, if your PeerTube administrator allows it, you can search a channel or a video directly by typing their web address in the PeerTube search bar.

It was not included in the crowdfunding, but we created an "Overview" page, that displays videos of some categories/tags/channels picked randomly, to show the diversity of the videos uploaded on PeerTube. You can see a demonstration here.

You can read the complete beta 12 changelog here.

Regarding the crowdfunding, most of the rewards are ready: the PeerTube README and the JoinPeerTube Hall of Fame show off the names of the persons who have chosen the corresponding rewards. We will soon be able to send the personalized thank-you digital arts to people that gave 80€ (~93 USD) and more - and it's so beautiful that we are looking forward to it!

The last feature we have to implement is the videos redundancy between instances, which will further increase resilience on instance overload. If all goes well, we should finish it in about two weeks (end of september).

We remind you that you can track the progress of the work directly on the git repository, and be part of the discussions/bug reports/feature requests in the "Issues" tab.

Moreover, you can ask questions on the PeerTube forum. You can also contact us directly on https://contact.framasoft.org.

Cheers,
Framasoft

The development of the crowdfunding features is going well.

As a reminder, in the first newsletter (July 23rd, 2018), we announced that the localization system and RSS feeds were implemented, and that we were making progress on the subtitles support and the advanced search.

These four features are all implemented, and can already be used on instances updated to version v1.0.0-beta.10 (for example https://framatube.org). Regarding the subtitles support, you can test them on the the "What is PeerTube" video.

We are currently finishing the video import system, from a URL (YouTube, Vimeo etc) or a torrent file. This feature should be available in a few days, when we will release a new version (v1.0.0-beta.11).

The import system will complete the first crowdfunding goal. The next feature we will be working on will be the user subscriptions.

We remind you that you can track the progress of the work directly on the git repository, and be part of the discussions/bug reports/feature requests in the "Issues" tab.

Moreover, you can ask questions on the PeerTube forum. You can also contact us directly on https://contact.framasoft.org.

Cheers,
Framasoft

First of all, thank you again for contributing to PeerTube! ❤️

During the crowdfunding campaign, we continued to work on the localization system. And we are happy to announce it's finally completed: it will be available in the next beta (beta 10) of PeerTube. As of this writing, the web interface is already available in english, french, basque, catalan, czech and esperanto (huge thank you to all of the translators). If you too want to help translating PeerTube, do not hesitate to check out the documentation!

Regarding the RSS feeds feature, it was already implemented by Rigelk and you can already use it in the beta 9. You can, for example, get the feed of the last local videos uploaded in a particular instance.

Subtitles support is well under way, and we should have a first version available soon. When this work is finished, we will develop the advanced search.

We remind you that you can track the progress of the work directly on the git repository, and be part of the discussions/bug reports/feature requests in the "Issues" tab.

Moreover, you can ask questions on the PeerTube forum. You can also contact us directly on https://contact.framasoft.org.

Cheers,
Framasoft