Nice idea, but I'd rename after something that isn't evil - subconscious suggestions of maliciousness might inadvertently repel some users. I'd suggest finding a design person who can lighten it up, pretty it up, and clean it up - the design has possibilities, but it's way too dark. Finally, many of the sample photos have really, really cold color temps (that cupcake photo's color temp is way too cold - it looks like a corpse is holding it). I'd suggest editing them to be have a warmer color temp., or finding other media that are more compelling. The initial experience of a cold, dark, kind of confusing goblin dungeon doesn't call up a great feel.
GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud
21–30 of 72 posts
Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi! Lead developer of MediaGoblin here. I agree, the frontpage of mediagoblin.org can use some improvement. We're working on that. If you want a fast summary of things, you can still watch the video from the crowdfunding campaign we ran last year with the FSF (hell, you can still donate too!). http://mediagoblin.org/pages/campaign.html We also have an intern helping us clean up the homepage. Things should be getting…
When do you plan to reach 1.0 with your checklist items? What is a short summary on how federation will work? Do you plan theme-ing support?
Heya! So, it's hard to know precisely re: 1.0, but I'm anticipating approximately towards the end of the year. Federation is the big thing we're still waiting on until we consider ourselves 1.0-worthy. Probably we could have tagged ourselves 1.0 a while ago and considered federation 2.0, but federation is at the root of a lot of our goals, so...
Anyway, once all our summer projects wrap up, I think we'll have reached 1.0-worthiness, however there's a lot of code being developed right now, and I can't promise how long it'll take for it to hit the "quality approval for merge" state.
We've had theming for a while, since 0.3.1! http://mediagoblin.org/news/mediagoblin-0.3.1-a-whole-new-lo...
Read the documentation for details on that, but you can already enable a light "airy" theme if you prefer.
PS: If you're a python developer and interested in federation, you may be interested in checking out our super-awesome-contributor Jessica Tallon's "PyPump" library, which integrates with the Pump API: https://github.com/xray7224/PyPump
I know she wants more users and feedback! Pump API integration is on the way, but in the meanwhile, there's a project that's already using it if you want to try out the API: http://pump.io/
Thanks for the excellent questions! Hope that rambly response was helpful :)
Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it's an excellent opportunity for up and coming designers to contribute to a promising open source project.
The architecture is also fundamentally flawed. How many people want to be the SysAdmin for all 2.0 services for their entire extended family? We need self-organizing systems, not federation.
It's a legitimate complaint that syadmin'ing all these services is a lot of work, but I think that's actually an argument for working to make deployment of services such as MediaGoblin easier. Right now deploying web applications is hard... if we could get things at least to the point of deploying and maintaining systems are "as easy" (note the quotes) as "apt-get install" and "apt-get upgrade" then we'd be in a much better state. But there's a lot of work happening right now towards abstracting deployment; I think if we can turn some of that effort towards generalizing deployment recipies for everyone (not just people running big clusters of servers) we could make big improvement here. Projects like JuJu and OpenShift are probably the right directions, but admittedly I haven't had enough time to spend playing with them.
Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud
#24Reminds of the line from Spaceballs: "now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb." Seriously, what an amatuerish-looking mess. White text on black, no clear navigation path, I can't imagine any random end user actually using one of these sites.
So it's an excellent opportunity for up and coming designers to contribute to a promising open source project.
Definitely! We have a lead graphic designer and nearly 50 programmers. As you can imagine that graphic designer is overstretched. Do you know any graphic designers who are interested in helping make MediaGoblin nicer? Point them our way, we'd love to talk to them! http://mediagoblin.org/pages/join.html
Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud
#25Reminds of the line from Spaceballs: "now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb." Seriously, what an amatuerish-looking mess. White text on black, no clear navigation path, I can't imagine any random end user actually using one of these sites.
"Seriously, what an amatuerish-looking mess. White text on black, no clear navigation path, I can't imagine any random end user actually using one of these sites." You could say the same thing about MS-DOS, but if it gets the job done it will get used. The most important thing is functionality, not UI. After all, you can't polish a turd.
>You could say the same thing about MS-DOS
And maybe that's why nobody uses it anymore.
If you want to compare, compare to something current. MS DOS was not that amateurish looking for its age and its user base at the time.
(nobody as in "mostly outliers", for you pedants)
Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud
#26Any reason why you guys went rambo building on top of werkzeug instead of, say, django or flask? Serious questions. I love the project.
Heya! Well, our architecture is very Flask-like, but yes it does not use Flask. There's kind of "historical reasons" for this; at the time that I started MediaGoblin Flask was fairly new, and we started out using MongoDB (so we couldn't make use of some of the nicer Django features anyway). I also really strongly prefer Jinja2 templates over Django's because of the ability to pass in arguments to functions, so eventually Django didn't make sense. But the real root of it though is that it's not actually as much work as people think to hook together a WSGI application that uses the libraries you already know you want... not really that much harder than using Flask anyway! http://docs.webob.org/en/latest/do-it-yourself.html is a good read in that vein.
Will MediaGoblin stick with its own direction, or move over to using Django or become a Flask app? It kind of depends... at the moment, things seem to be running well, and aside for waiting for some of our libraries to catch up to Python 3, we don't seem very hampered by it, and we're also very nimble... changing core parts of MediaGoblin to fit our needs is presently very easy. It also might be interesting to see what happens if eventually we end up adopting some XUDD technologies: https://xudd.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ but admittedly that's a ways out (though MediaGoblin already can run on XUDD, as of yesterday ;)) if that will happen at all.
Sorry, kind of a rambly response! Hope it was interesting.
Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud
#27I mean, it's not decentralized. It's simply hostable.
Decentralized would be like GNUNet[1].
Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud
#28Reminds of the line from Spaceballs: "now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb." Seriously, what an amatuerish-looking mess. White text on black, no clear navigation path, I can't imagine any random end user actually using one of these sites.
You are the worst kind of HN user.
Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud
#29I mean, it's not decentralized. It's simply hostable. Decentralized would be like GNUNet[1]. 1: https://gnunet.org/
We're working on federation support, and I think that would be pretty fair to call decentralized?
Decentralized can have various definitions; GNUNet is definitely one definition, but you might consider that the web itself is supposed to be decentralized and is designed to be able to be that way, but is moving away from that as more and more of the web is being replaced by megasites like YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr. So, MediaGoblin is one attempt to take back the web in that respect.
Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud
#30Nice idea, but I'd rename after something that isn't evil - subconscious suggestions of maliciousness might inadvertently repel some users. I'd suggest finding a design person who can lighten it up, pretty it up, and clean it up - the design has possibilities, but it's way too dark. Finally, many of the sample photos have really, really cold color temps (that cupcake photo's color temp is way too cold - it looks like…
Heya! So, we sometimes get comments about the branding choice of "goblins"... our goblins are actually not evil, though I agree that a lot of $STANDARD_FANTASY they're used as evil characters. Our goblins are more "build spaceships, be cute, and be awesome" goblins like http://mediagoblin.org/news/mediagoblin-0.3.2-goblinverse.ht...
Curiously we've gotten a number of concerns about maybe the branding will push people away by thinking that the goblins are evil or scary or will frighten children, but we've never actually had anyone tell us that it actually invoked that reaction in them, just that they're concerned about it. And a lot of people seem to really like the goblins.
We do have a light theme called "airy"; there's some debate about whether that theme should be default. The choice of a dark theme isn't to invoke something dungeon'y, it's to put spotlight on the media, making the media the "light" of the scene. But anyway, maybe at some point we will switch over to airy by default... we'll see what the future brings.
Thanks for your comment!