Developing an ethical and emancipating alternative to YouTube, Twitch, or Vimeo without Surveillance Capitalism's means is a monumental undertaking. Especially for a small French not-for-profit that already manages several projects to promote digital commons.

As we look back on six years of developing PeerTube, we're excited to share our progress and outline what's next for this innovative platform. Thanks to your donations to our not-for-profit, Framasoft is taking action to advance the ethical, user-friendly web. Find a summary of our progress in 2023 on our Support Framasoft page.

The Birth of an Alternative

The realization that led us to develop PeerTube was that no one can rival YouTube or Twitch without adopting their exploitative business models. We needed to create a tool that democratizes video hosting, empowering small groups and communities to take control of their online presence.

That's exactly what we did. We designed PeerTube with radically different values in mind, prioritizing transparency, autonomy, and empowerment. Today, PeerTube is:

  • A Free-Libre software, transparently maintained and open-source
  • A platform that allows self-hosting on your own server, giving you control over your data
  • A tool for creating your video and livestream platform, with your own rules and community building capabilities
  • A federated network, enabling seamless connections between PeerTube instances through ActivityPub protocol

Six Years of Development

In the last six years, we've invested more than 275,000 lines of code into PeerTube. Our progress has been remarkable:

  • From a proof-of-concept to a fully operative federated video platform with p2p broadcasting, subtitles, redundancy, and more (PeerTube v1, oct. 2018)
  • The addition of notifications, playlists, moderation tools, federation tools, and localization (PeerTube v2, nov. 2019)
  • A federated research tool, improved moderation capabilities, and peer-to-peer livestreaming (PeerTube v3, Jan. 2021)
  • Enhanced transcoding, channels and instances customization, and advanced search capabilities (PeerTube v4, Dec. 2021)
  • Video editing tools, replay features for permanent livestreams, and an improved video player (for mobile displays) (PeerTube v5, Dec. 2022)
  • Account request moderation, remote transcoding, and storyboard previews (PeerTube v6, Nov. 2023)

And that's just the software development side of PeerTube. We've also built a thriving ecosystem around it.

The Ecosystem

PeerTube is not just a platform; it's a community-driven project with over 400 contributors, 4,300 issues closed, and 12,400 contributions integrated upstream. Our project forge is an online space where developers can collaborate on new features and improvements.

Contributors have also helped by translating PeerTube into more than 36 languages, providing support on our forum, updating our official documentation, and sharing ideas on our Let's Improve PeerTube feedback tool.

Today, there are over a thousand PeerTube platforms worldwide, hosting almost a million videos. We've created an instances index that feeds content to SepiaSearch, our search engine for decentralized video discovery.

As we look towards the future of mobile marketing, we're excited about the potential for PeerTube to revolutionize the way creators connect with their audiences and monetize their content. With your support, we can make this vision a reality.