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GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud

mediagoblin.org

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Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud

#41

Post by Raphael »

paroneayea wrote: post #30
nemo wrote: post #21

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…

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…

I'll fork and call it MediaDungeon.

Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud

#42

Post by paroneayea »

lotsofcows wrote: post #40
paroneayea wrote: post #17

Earlier 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…

Is your landing page your primary marketing mechanism? I think it's great that your given an intern that level of responsibility...

Keep in mind that MediaGoblin is mostly a community project. I'm the only paid fulltime employee at present (and that's thanks to the crowdfunding campaign through the FSF). It's a HUGE project, and there's not a lot of time to go around. So yes, if code's moving by a million miles a minute in the codebase and my job is to make sure that contributors are doing well and that the software is great, that might mean that the homepage might suffer... I can only do so many jobs at once.

And in any case, it's not just a "oh, we tossed an intern at this"; in this case, the person who's working on this is a community member and intern, and is doing work based on a detailed analysis based on another community member's work overviewing all our current messaging: http://lists.mediagoblin.org/pipermail/devel/2013-July/00061...

So it's not just a matter of, "oh get an intern and toss them at it"!

But hey, if you're bothered by the fact that we're a community project with not a lot of full time resources, you can donate and help us pay for more people to come on as dedicated resources! The crowdfunding campaign we ran through the FSF last year is over, but the donation link still works: http://mediagoblin.org/pages/campaign.html

Or, feel free to help us out yourself! http://mediagoblin.org/pages/join.html

Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud

#43

Post by paroneayea »

opendomain wrote: post #35
paroneayea wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, M…

Look very interesting, but can you please make this more clear? I can host media files in Wordpress or Drupal - why would I use MediaGoblin? With your federation would allow my video files to be on other servers so if mine goes down, they will host the content? How does that work? Round robin DNS or just my file is copied to other servers. Can I track, update, change, or remove my media from other servers? If this ea…

You can host media files on Wordpress or Drupal, but the goal here is to build an application that's very focused and tailored user-interface wise to media. Furthermore, Wordpress and Drupal alone might not very easily handle some of the extra tooling that MediaGoblin does: if you upload a video, that video needs to be transcoded; we have task queueing and infrastructure so that these things can happen in the background without you just sitting there and your browser timing out.

As for how federation will work, we may enable a plugin called "diskgobbler" or something that might dowload files, but no, by default, MediaGoblin will not mirror all files from the other sites it is federating with. :) Instead, the goal is to keep the social side of things alive: you can create galleries that have entries that span multiple sites, favoriting a piece of media can happen across instances, you can subscribe to things a-la YouTube channels. That's what we mean as in terms of what we aim for by federation.

Hope that answered a bit!

Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud

#44

Post by paroneayea »

Raphael wrote: post #41
paroneayea wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'll fork and call it MediaDungeon.

Please do run a MediaDungeon instance, and make it a dungeon crawler theme. I do like roguelikes. ;)

Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud

#45

Post by paroneayea »

nemo wrote: post #34
paroneayea wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wasn't suggesting that there'd be anything conscious about the branding, but that it'd be subconscious, so you wouldn't be likely to hear feedback. It's a minor nit, really. Glad to hear about theming. Flickr/500px/other sites chose to let users opt-in to black backgrounds, I think that is a nice approach - some media is better highlighted by a dark background, but not all. All the best to your project.

Thanks!

Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud

#46

Post by paroneayea »

amirouche wrote: post #38
paroneayea wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

aren't goblins somewhat gnomes enemy?

I guess under maybe certain $STANDARD_FANTASY systems, maybe! But "goblins" are actually a very amorphous "creature"... there's a lot of various designs of them throughout folklore, and even in recent fantasy, a lot of variations on what they actually are. We have a very different set of branding around what goblins are, and our own little goblin universe, at least as sketched out through the character art over release art and etc.

Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud

#47

Post by astrobe_ »

paroneayea wrote: post #22
alperakgun wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What is the status of the "federation" feature? I see there's two ideas of it on the Wiki.

Will it support easy mirroring of media? Will the site be also metaservers (servers that provide the addresses of other servers), or proxy servers (they serve the content of other servers they know of)? What about the bandwidth issues (often bandwidth is asymmetric between upstream/downstream)? Maybe some form of load balancing by redirection to another server. But one would need URI scheme across all the sites... Oh my.

Also: one-click-install for Windows/Mac when?

Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud

#48

Post by paroneayea »

amirouche wrote: post #39
paroneayea wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eventu…

+1 for «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» Also stop with the saying it's rambly please.

Apologies, I will work on reducing my apologies. ;)

Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud

#49

Post by peterwwillis »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #27

I mean, it's not decentralized. It's simply hostable. Decentralized would be like GNUNet[1]. 1: https://gnunet.org/

You've got it backwards. Decentralized is a distributed network of centralized systems. Distributed is a peer-to-peer network of nodes like GNUNet.

http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/unlikeus/resources/articles/...

Re: GNU MediaGoblin – A decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud

#50

Post by peterwwillis »

You will never get normal people to use this thing. This is just a big advertisement for open source developers to pick up a new coding hobby. It's really sad, because you could build an alternative to those services if you focused more on the product and less on IRC, git and LibreOffice.
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