MediaGoblin and FSF Successfully Raise Funds For Federation, Privacy Features

paroneayea writes: "GNU MediaGoblin and the Free Software Foundation have jointly run a campaign for privacy and federation on the web. The campaign is in its last day but has already passed the first two funding milestones, and is hoping to raise more with the possibility of bringing in multiple dedicated resources to the project. The project has also released a full financial transparency report so donors can know how they can expect their money to be used!"

What is MediaGoblin?

[trawg]

No explanation in the summary, so a quick copy/paste from the official site: "MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc. "

Basically it's a "private cloud" (I hate myself for writing that) with which you can upload your photos, videos, songs, etc - so they live on /your/ server.

It is actually pretty neat. It has the usual marks of an open source product - a very, uh, functional interface that doesn't really grab you immediately. It's a little fiddly to install, but not too bad.

But it all works pretty well - I set up a test server reasonably quickly, and it performs as advertised. Getting photos and videos online is nice and easy, although there's no obvious way to upload albums - it's all one photo at a time (looks like it's at least on their TODO [mediagoblin.org].

I think for it to get some solid mainstream acceptance they'll need to work on the design side - make it look beautiful and Apple-ish out of the box so that civilians are immediately awestruck with how pretty it is - otherwise they might struggle to find adoption outside of the hardcore OSS crowd.

But it's a cool idea, and it's good to see it got funding - the federation stuff will be interesting and if done correctly could really make it a good tool for media sharing.

Re:What is MediaGoblin?

[freedeb]

Glad you you like our idea! Some of what we'll working on in the coming year is the fiddliness that (most) people are currently encountering during the installation process. We've also recently been doing some user testing [openhatch.org], so we're looking forward to improving on that front as well. Of course, the federation is our top priority code-wise, but we've got people working on all levels.

Since it can be hard to see your own bugs, we're always happy to take feedback on the installation process, usability or look and feel if you want to chat with us via email or on IRC (#mediagoblin on freenode.net) And in true do-ocracy style, we welcome anyone who wants to come and "scratch their own itch" and add to MediaGoblin's functionality in a way that would make it more useful, exciting or appealing for themsleves.