For now, it's mostly only the possibility writing in the "About" page of the server ways to support it, possibly with a banner above videos to encourage people to give money. Creators can also add a "Support" button below videos to tell viewers how to support them.
But I think some people are working on requiring people to login and have a subscription to view videos.
I don't know of an existing plugin that injects pre-roll ads, but it could probably already be developed with the current available APIs.
Oh, sorry to hear this. We'll make sure to follow your observations to the team.
As we can now afford to pay designers, some parts of the interface are being improved, but it's a slow progress. Here are some resources on our work in v7: https://joinpeertube.org/news/share-ressources
Otherwise, accounts such as Fedivideo mentioned in this thread are doing a very good job to curate content you might like, and we want to help that (with our limited resources).
Our developers were writing Free Software on their free time before they got hired, because Framasoft knew them through their free-time productions, but obviously not everybody can do that, and we've very lucky to have an economic model which allows us to pay developers properly.
Because we're a very small team, and we're okay with it staying this way. Not all of us are speaking English correctly. Having a worldwide audience would mean communicating in English all the time, providing assistance in English.
Also, we want to grow at a pace that suits us. We would much prefer if there were other organizations doing exactly the same thing as us in other countries that we could refer people to.
Sadly no, right now we don't really have the time to approach these types of organizations and try to make partnerships. However, there is the possibility for a hosting provider offering PeerTube as a solution to contact them and make them a complete offer.
We have a support button that can be shown on videos to provide instructions on how to support a channel (for instance with Liberapay). I don't know what you had in mind that would the integration would be like, but please share it on https://ideas.joinpeertube.org/. Most probably it could be solved through a simple plugin.
We don't think PeerTube will directly replace YouTube at some point, but we do think that some organizations, media outlets, and content creators may not have the same level of interest in posting on YouTube as they do today. For all of them, we hope they will find PeerTube to be a good fit.
We prefer monthly donations because they help us maintain financial stability throughout the year, whereas one-time donations tend to come in mainly when we run fundraising campaigns like this one (which means that some months our cash flow is low).
Monetization is a complicated and potentially sensitive topic that we have not yet addressed.
However, this is not the only reason why YouTube is in its dominant position; even with monetization, the network effect of this platform will always remain.
PeerTube today meets the demand for video hosting (e.g., the market where Vimeo is positioned), but is not really a distribution channel with social features like YouTube.
While our goal is not to provide a definitive answer to this shortcoming, we are considering possibilities for integration with third-party payment or subscription platforms (such as Patreon) to make it easy to restrict videos to subscribers, for example. That's something we're thinking of, but is very far from being done.
Finally, there is already the Bunseed project (website exclusively in French, sorry) which is looking into this issue and has a prototype based on Ghost (publishing, subscription, email) + PeerTube + payment platform (such as Stripe).
Feel free to send us a message through our contact form whenever you want to talk about a specific topic! We're always interested to talk with other Fediverse project so we can try to provide softwares!
I don't think we have been. Thing is, we do not know of many organizations that are identical to us in other countries: we're not really a Linux or FLOSS group, and we don't lobby governments or other institutions. In some ways, we're similar to Disroot which also offers services as we do, but since we do quite a lot of other stuff (developing PeerTube, producing commons, sharing knowledge, and we even have a publishing house!)
Even if we have been working with a lot of partners, most of them are French and on very specific topics.
If people want to join forces on the FLOSS-software-hosting services topic, maybe look into something similar to the (very french) CHATONS (and possibly https://libreho.st/, but it's no longer active to our knowledge).
On the topic of contributing to develop things together, we're not doing much apart from PeerTube (we only have two developers, and both are working nearly fully on PeerTube).
You can get up-to-date and detailed statistics (2024) on the crowdfunding page in the "Who is Framasoft? How do they get funds to make PeerTube?" :
We are funded by donations (mainly from the French-speaking community). 94 % of our 2024 funds comes from donations, with 76 % from grassroots donations, and 18 % from fondations' grants (like NLnet).
We didn't start big. Framasoft exists since 21 years with a team full of volunteers.
However, there are essential steps we reached during our journey.
First, we launched the de-google-ify campaign, aiming to help people to escape from Big Tech. This campaign happened only two years after Snowden's revelations and we think it played a big role in its success in France.
Quickly, we had enough money to hire new employees.
So, we had the ability to hire our sysadmin at full time. That helped us a lot to maintain a good service quality so people knew they could trust us with their data and use our services.
Finally, we hired someone dedicated to our communication. He did a huge work and helped us to find our identity: you know, all those cute mascots you can find on most of our communications.
We wanted FLOSS softwares to be attractive for most people and this new identity helped us a lot to reach a wider audience (not only tech-savvy people!).
Also, we work hard each year to build funding campaigns. They are helping us a lot to collect the money we need to work but require at least 1 month of work from different people of our team.
Concerning tips and strategis to other FLOSS devs... It's kinda hard since we think the context we had is different from now. BUT, we truly think that being respectful to people using our services and transparent about our failures helped people to understand we are just a small team of humans trying to do their best!
As the major part of our income comes from our fundraising campaign at the end of every year, it depends on when you ask this question. So, along the year, we're operating with something between 3 and 9 months buffer. Of course, we're lucky to also have monthly donators who help ensure that cash flow does not decline too much.
For now, it's mostly only the possibility writing in the "About" page of the server ways to support it, possibly with a banner above videos to encourage people to give money. Creators can also add a "Support" button below videos to tell viewers how to support them.
But I think some people are working on requiring people to login and have a subscription to view videos.
I don't know of an existing plugin that injects pre-roll ads, but it could probably already be developed with the current available APIs.