Our plans for PeerTube in 2024

We (Bonjour, we are Framasoft, a small French not-for-profit!) are proud to present our roadmap for the 2024 developments and side projects we have for PeerTube.

Please keep in mind that we have only two developers dedicated to PeerTube, as it is one of our 50+ projects.

PeerTube’s roadmap for v7

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.

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!