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.

Re:

[g4sy]

I love the fundraiser and wish the best of luck. I'm a bit frustrated by the timing... I went to donate but it didn't want to go through the first time (non-US card, sometimes I need to call them up) and sadly you've timed it to end on a Friday when all the banks etc. are closed!!! So regretfully no contribution from me ... I'll do it on Tuesday when the banks re-open, but will I still be able to get the t-shirt, 3d-printed logo, stickers and a Thank GNU?

Re:What is MediaGoblin?

[trawg]

Thanks for the reply.

I've actually been working on a deployment script for our service (we have a VPS hosting business in Australia), which gets most of it up and running in a single-click-deploy kind of way ( https://www.binarylane.com.au/... [binarylane.com.au] if you're interested).

It still needs some work (haven't set it up with Nginx, yet) but I had a few people interested in trying it and this meant they could have it up and running in a few minutes to tinker with.

I'll have a think about it - as a VPS provider I am really big on the idea of "private cloud" stuff and I'd really like to make things like this simple for users so they can easily deploy stuff without having to become Linux sysadmins.

Re:

[Squash]

This will probably be a very unpopular opinion, but I'm going to post it anyway.

I run a site that could be a great fit for MediaGoblin, but I'm not going to use it because it's a Python app. This rather quickly turns it into an app that requires a dedicated server. Even with cheap cloud hosting, the name of the game for smaller sites is to run several on a single instance.

I get that developers often use the language they like, and a lot of developers like Python. The commodity hosting world is still ruled b

Re:

[voltorb]

Given his ignorant manner, I think he's talking about Windows.

Re:

[RazorSharp]

In my experience that's not true. Practically all cheap (i.e. not dedicated) hosting solutions have Python. I have a small site on FatCow.com and it supports Python without forking over extra for a dedicated server.

I can understand free hosting solutions lacking Python (and perhaps lacking any scripting whatsoever), but anything you pay for should be able to run Python scripts. Python is so common and easy to implement I can't imagine why any web host would lack it.

Re:

[handheldKete]

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.

I've also seen it encouraged as something that someone provides for a few of their friends as well as themselves since, they argued, that it cannot be expected that everyone run their own server: at least not overnight.

Re:

[sgt scrub]

They could always make it easy to learn how to fiddle with instead of trying to make it meet their concept of good. I hold up the reaction to the Gnome Shell as an example of what can go wrong. Free software is free to me because it has helped me to write software. There is nothing that makes me feel more free than having my apps and content on my servers to be accessed at will. Well, except when my ISP decides it is file sharing or I'm using too much bandwidth.

Re:

[wertigon]

I think the path of least resistance when it comes to federation would be to make MG compatible with the BuddyCloud MediaServer [youtube.com] concept, since BC being based on XMPP already has excellent federation.

Regardless I think this is promising. My hope is that GMG+Federation will some day in the future challenge both Facebook, Youtube and similar sites - which is sorely needed because the contentID-issue at Google has shown that we need a solution where users control their own data.