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MediaGoblin – Self Hosted, Decentralized Alt to YouTube, Flickr, SoundCloud

610 points by huntermeyer 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hoodoof 9y ago
This looks like another way of sharing stuff that big companies don't want you to share. I seem to recall this story not ending well in the past. And AGPL? - such an unappealing license - it's the license for open source extremists.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Or just sharing private content you don't want the big companies to have.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    AGPL is great for letting regular people host stuff without large companies taking over your project and giving it to their 100000000000000000 centralized user base.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - flukus 9y ago
      No it isn't, companies are able to do that if they want. AGPL just makes sure those companies release their modifications to your project.
      - EGreg 9y ago
        They usually have polices to not even touch AGPL.
      - quadrangle 9y ago
        Yes indeed. The implication from the other poster was that companies can't exploit the project and make derivatives without sharing their source code. That doesn't stop them, but it does make it possible for people to get the updates, self-host or create competing instances, which is a major check on the power that proprietary services have.
    - raggi 9y ago
      What projects have been taken over like this and still exist?
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      My comment refers to the notion that users of MediaGoblin can store treasured private content without it being indexed and monetized by large providers. This is true regardless of which open source license is used, and I am a strong supporter of permissive licensing over copyleft. ;) I see nothing wrong with corporations building their proprietary platforms on top of open source software as long as I'm not required to use it.
  - mrschwabe 9y ago
    Interesting that nathcd's comment (on this comment thread specifially) is 'dead'. Basically he explains politely and using analogy why AGPL seems just fine and then points out there seems to be a trend of anti-copyleft on HN lately. Subsequently his comment is now 'dead'... point proven?
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      Bear in mind, HN, beyond just being "tech news" is very connected to the startup culture by the very nature of being YC's. So there's a heck of a lot of business people around here, and businesses want to avoid licenses that lead to additional legal responsibility. It's particularly a liability if you're hoping another company will buy yours and integrate your software with theirs. Sometimes as an open source and privacy advocate, I feel like I'm in the minority here, along with a couple of other voices I see along the same lines as me. Though, I am pretty anti-copyleft as well. Go figure.
      - ue_ 9y ago
        Perhaps that's why my comments advocating far left ideas afe frequently downvoted, even in on topic threads. Too many businesspeople :)
- wyldfire 9y ago
  I disagree -- regular ol' people generate way more video and audio content than the artists of RIAA+MPAA. If you want to distribute copyrighted content, there are much better solutions to that problem than Mediagoblin. But if you want to put a video of your class lecture somewhere students can see it, it could be a much better option than Youtube. Especially if your classes discuss works of art still protected by copyright. Even though it's your right to discuss it via fair use, who wants the headache of arguing with rightsholders and Google's bots? It's AGPL specifically because it's a GNU project. shrug if you want to write a BSD one, that's your right. IMO they're not extremists. I like the BSD license a lot. But I also think that sometimes some companies exploit software developed under BSD licenses and in those cases coders and users alike lose out. For that reason I think it's very appropriate that the GPL and AGPL exist.
- nathcd 9y ago
  Being that this is an end-user application (and not a library), what does the AGPL matter? Would you otherwise be releasing proprietary MediaGoblin extensions? Is it just me or are the copyleft digs increasing in number lately? The little jabs seem nearly as immature as outsiders requesting that FOSS maintainers rewrite their projects in different languages.
  - wyldfire 9y ago
    For the record, I think mediagoblin should use whatever license they see fit. But the distinction between GPL and AGPL here matters. If mediagoblin were GPL you could use it to host better-than-youtube.com -- and subsequently add a hardware-accelerated-3d-folksonomy feature to your better-than-youtube.com instance. better-than-youtube.com's users would be [effectively] using a work derived from mediagoblin and yet they would not have access to its source because they were never distributed the binary. GNU created the AGPL to solve the problem created by the trend of "Software-as-a-service".
    - raggi 9y ago
      If you look at some of the installations listed in the wiki they have clearly been modified. They do not provide their modifications publicly, and are in violation of section 5. This is the core challenge with user modified agpl over user modified gpl. These users are unwittingly in violation - their acceptance of the license terms without understanding them leaving them in a position of legal risk.
      - quadrangle 9y ago
        The whole GPL family has no requirement of providing source publicly. The requirement is to make source available upon request to those who are the recipients of the software. > they have clearly been modified How do you know? Mediagoblin has lots of settings and prefs to adapt how it works. Anyway, the source-provision applies whether or not it's modified. It's the responsibility of any instance of Mediagoblin to provide source upon request to visitors of the instance. The source must match what is running. Modified or not is irrelevant. > unwittingly in violation Not at all. They will be in violation if you can access their instance and you ask them for the source and they refuse to give it to you.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  > AGPL … the license for open source extremists. Nonsense. The sort of people who appreciate the AGPL are the sort who either say or at least acknowledge that others say "it's free software, not open source". If you think AGPL is unappealing and that's as far as you take it besides asserting it being extreme, you don't understand the basic concept of software freedom, so you can't judge when someone is extreme about it or not.
- hyperdunc 9y ago
  The term "open-source extremists" is somewhat oxymoronic and reminds of the term "militant atheists". In real terms, neither category is particularly edgy.
kemonocode 9y ago
I always seem to remember this project sort of limping along, only to forget it a while after as even though I'm an artist and I could make some use of it, the setup is far too much of a trouble when a Wordpress blog would do the trick for sharing my works just fine. Maybe it needs something akin to what happened with GNU/Social and Mastodon to be thrown into the limelight.
- wyldfire 9y ago
  I don't have much experience with it but IMO mediagoblin might suit small organizations slightly better than individuals. It's probably best for folks who want their cycling club, makerspace, HOA, scouts troop, university, etc to be able to share media without being subject to content restrictions, silly communities, etc.
  - CM30 9y ago
    My question however is whether said people would be technically capable of getting it running. I mean, it's simple for those with experience in running a server or unmanaged VPS, who know how to run Python scripts and setup Docker or what not. But the average person in many of these small organisations (even the tech team) is probably confused by a simple WordPress install or even the process of uploading files to a web hosting account. I feel these solutions seem like they should be aimed at the people and groups you mention, but end up seeming like they're designed for tech geeks and programmers. They need to be made to work on cheaper hosting accounts and installable by someone whose experience with 'tech' is clicking buttons in a user interface.
    - cubano 9y ago
      While I was nodding my head in agreement while reading your comment, this sentence disturbed me... But the average person in many of these small organisations (even the tech team) is probably confused by a simple WordPress install or even the process of uploading files to a web hosting account. If a "tech team" can't even upload a file to a server, that is really a piss poor tech team and in general shouldn't even be labeled as such, IMO.
rglullis 9y ago
Curious to see this here, given that I've been trying to set up some of these "decentralized services" at my home servers and figuring out if it is really possible to replace the common mainstream services. So far, I installed my own Matrix server (synapse), my own XMPP (ejabberd), yesterday I got semi-happy with my mastodon setup, and now I was just finishing some tests with ownCloud to see if I could replace Dropbox. MediaGoblin is on my list of services to setup. I ran a basic deployment and checked some other instances of it before, but I didn't put it higher on my priority list because to me it looks like it focus too much on being a "community-driven website" instead of providing a solid service as a media-hosting/publishing/catalog system. To me it looks like they are shooting for the wrong level of "decentralization granularity". Each instance of these services are aiming for a "community", and think that the people use the mainstream tools because they don't want to/won't manage the server. The point they seem to miss is that this only creates another type of top-down organization. It would be MUCH easier for them to focus on a "single-user" system, and start from the point that the communication will work when the applications talk with each other. To me this is why Diaspora failed, and Wordpress is still such a big part of the internet. Another thing I noticed: the projects that really focused on separating client from server produced much better results in terms of UI/UX. With Matrix, I just had to setup the server, and then I could have the riot app just point to my instance. If by any chance a better client comes around, my instance would be untouched.
- anderspitman 9y ago
  I dabbled with ownCloud, Seafile, etc and came away disappointed. At the time I was trying to run them on a raspberry pi and ownCloud at least was too heavy. Eventually I found Syncthing and that's been the ticket for me. It's great for synchronization but not so much for general sharing.
  - simplehuman 9y ago
    Did you try nextcloud?
  - mikenew 9y ago
    If all you want is file syncing then Syncthing is really fantastic. I have a NextCloud installation on a Raspberry Pi 3, and getting it to work well took some suffering. If you use a MySQL database and php 7 it can actually perform pretty well though, at least for a small number of clients. A big issue with the Pi is that it shares the Ethernet and USB on the same bus, so there's a hard limit to your file access speeds. But for syncing between my own machines plus the occasional file share I am extremely happy with the setup.
flamedoge 9y ago
BitChute is another
paradite 9y ago
Is this project still in active development? The release version has not reached 1.0 but there were only a few commits in the past months: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/mediagoblin.git/log/ http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/mediagoblin.git/log/
- paroneayea 9y ago
  Hi, MediaGoblin co-founder and co-maintainer here. It's still under active development, though I've temporarily handed over the reigns to others while I've been busy getting the federation standard we're going to use nicely shaped up through the W3C spec process https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ That's taken up more of my last year (okay, last two years) than I expected. I'll be back in the swing of things within the next few months. We have a federation branch right now, but the standardization process of ActivityPub meant that we're going to have to retool some things before its released in 1.0! The good news is that ActivityPub is looking to be picked up by projects like NextCloud, Mastodon, Pump.io, and quite possibly GNU Social, Diaspora, postActiv. This means we should be able to have more federation working across the many federated social web projects out there. If you're interested in ActivityPub and federation generally, I highly recommend checking out the tutorial, which is baked into the spec: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview In the meanwhile, Boris Bobrov (breton) has been kindly doing the main work along maintainership while I've been preoccupied. But, I'll be back soon... and it'll be good to be back!
  - mike-cardwell 9y ago
    I can't figure out what advantages ActivityPub has over email. It seems to just be a way of sending messages to one or more recipients. Email already does this. Couldn't you just stash that blob of JSON in an email body? That way, no new servers would need to be set up; everyone already has an email address.
    - reitanqild 9y ago
      Do you want server-to-server communication to depend on yhe mercy of spam filters? Or client-server communication ?
anderspitman 9y ago
I'm still waiting for an open source self-hosted alternative to Google Drive. Even just the basic functionality of a file browser, image thumbnails, photo gallery, and video player would be fantastic. Many such projects exist, and maybe I'm just lazy, but I really don't want to have to set up a PHP server in order to run such a thing. I would love something like Syncthing where you download a compiled Go binary, start up the service, and configure it through your browser. I started implementing something like this myself but didn't make it very far. The fear of eventually running out of space or having privacy/security issues on Drive hasn't produced enough pain for me to really do anything yet.
- swiley 9y ago
  Why do you want that in a browser? what's wrong with the native graphical shells?
  - throwanem 9y ago
    You have to install them, and they have to exist for every platform where you want to use them. For cloud services, the only unambiguous win for native over web client is access to platform APIs that the browser may not use.
    - swiley 9y ago
      Someone has to install them, not always you. Someone has to install these web shells too, often not you.
- chipperyman573 9y ago
  OwnCloud?
  - quadrangle 9y ago
    original project forked to become NextCloud (but haven't looked myself at the status of each, just assuming NextCloud is the way to go now)
symlinkk 9y ago
Why use this instead of just putting a directory on public FTP or something?
- tekni5 9y ago
  So you can stream videos for the most part. Also you can let others upload, make comments, etc.
rchrd2 9y ago
MediaGoblin is available on Sandstorm (eg one click install): https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/70awyqss6jq2gkz7dwzsnvumzr07256pzdt3hda9acfuxwh6uh7h https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/70awyqss6jq2gkz7dwzsnvumzr0725...
- simplehuman 9y ago
  It is very outdated. https://wiki.mediagoblin.org/EasyDeployment#Sandstorm https://wiki.mediagoblin.org/EasyDeployment#Sandstorm
  - dublinben 9y ago
    It would certainly be better if the version on Sandstorm was more up to date, but the current version works. If you're just interested in trying it out with minimal hassle.
    - simplehuman 9y ago
      What's the point of that? There is a live demo in the media goblin site if I want to try.
      - dublinben 9y ago
        The "try a demo right now" link on the MediaGoblin homepage is just a link to Sandstorm.
Veratyr 9y ago
I think to be able to say you're a "decentralized alternative to YouTube, Flickr, SoundCloud", you really need some way to search across all the servers in the network or at least interact with them and as far as I can tell, that doesn't exist. In the tour there's not even any mention of decentralization that I can see. Is there something I'm missing? Also in terms of self hosting, something I'd really like is the ability to point it at a pile of files and have it ingest them in place. Any idea whether that's possible?
- grault 9y ago
  Wrt search, I guess it's seen as an orthogonal problem and meant to be dealt with by indexing / search services..
  - Veratyr 9y ago
    In that case though, why claim to be "decentralized"? That to me means one large, interconnected network, which one can access through any of its members. Mastodon is decentralized; you can make an account on any server and search and follow users on any other server without leaving. Bittorrent is decentralized, you can grab info from the DHT then connect to peers and download stuff. If it depends on an index/searching service, how is the network itself any more decentralized than say an FTP server? I wouldn't call FTP decentralized.
stefek99 9y ago
Interview from 2013 - they have been around - http://redecentralize.org/interviews/2013/10/13/06-chris-mediagoblin.html http://redecentralize.org/interviews/2013/10/13/06-chris-med...
motters 9y ago
Mediagoblin is also available as an app on Freedombone (https://freedombone.net https://freedombone.net)
thunfisch 9y ago
If you're looking for a more end-to-end solution, suitable for lecture/event recording, processing and distribution with a more permissive license, you might want to checkout http://www.opencast.org http://www.opencast.org as well.
xiconfjs 9y ago
opened the first 3x live instances [1] and all videos required flash... [1] https://wiki.mediagoblin.org/Live_instances https://wiki.mediagoblin.org/Live_instances
leemailll 9y ago
Reminds me of the dead gallery project and Piwigo. Any comparison with these?
zoner 9y ago
This is awesome. The amount of censure we are getting on YT and others is ridiculous. We are a group promoting racial awareness, not something the current empire is tolerating, alas it's members are a target of modern age witch hunting. I'm surprised I haven't found this project before, but I'm sure I'll also contribute to it in the future. Just a little note if would be easier to find it if the source code was hosted on GitHub.
- wodenokoto 9y ago
  The only kind of "racial awareness" I can think of that is not welcome by "the current empire" is white supremacy. Interest groups for blacks, asians and a lot of other races usually get accepted by the broader society. So I am curious which group you are part of
  - zoner 9y ago
    I'm white. So you like all other than white? Isn't it racist and hateful?
    - dang 9y ago
      HN is not a place for political or ideological battle, and certainly not for race war. You've posted like this before. Please don't do it again.
- mikegerwitz 9y ago
  > Just a little note if would be easier to find it if the source code was hosted on GitHub. For some background: MediaGoblin is a GNU project, and GNU discourages the use of GitHub: https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.html https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.html But GNU doesn't prohibit the use of GitHub for mirroring, only as the primary location for the project and repository.
- hyperdunc 9y ago
  Reading between the lines, I'm going to assume by "racial awareness" you mean rising white identity as a counter to the race-based identity politics in the West that frames "minorities as victim groups". Seems to me the best way to deal with this is to deconstruct racial and group identity altogether rather than jump on board and further validate it. Regardless, YouTube may often demonetize the most innocuous of content but it rarely censors it outright.
TorKlingberg 9y ago
I found a video on one of the example sites and opened it on mobile, iOS and the Google Search app. The video didn't play. That is why Youtube is so dominant. 12 years later and nobody else has figured out how to make videos that actually play.
- scriptkiddy 9y ago
  I figured it out. You need to store several encodings of the same file. One in webm for most cases, and one in mp4 for all other cases. If a platform doesn't support webm or Mp4, it probably couldn't play the video anyway.
  - vbernat 9y ago
    Then, you have to solve the problem with how to seek in a 2-hour long video.
cdolan92 9y ago
This may be off topic, but does anyone think that there is a correlation between pop culture (Silicon Valley's Pied Piper this season) and services like this springing up/getting more attention than normal?
- somedumbguy22 9y ago
  I thought about this too, but it could just be something similar to blue car syndrome[1], where I'm just noticing it now because of silicon valley. [1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/153166/what-is-the-term-for-when-you-become-more-aware-of-something https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/153166/what-is-t...
- cubano 9y ago
  It would be pretty silly to think this a coincidence and of course <pop>culture drives all sorts of behaviors.
criddell 9y ago
This seems like the kind of thing that should be packaged to be one-click-installed on a NAS box.
- nobodyorother 9y ago
  You mean, like Sandstorm did? https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/70awyqss6jq2gkz7dwzsnvumzr07256pzdt3hda9acfuxwh6uh7h https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/70awyqss6jq2gkz7dwzsnvumzr0725...
  - criddell 9y ago
    Yes. Just like that, except in the format that QNAP, Synology, and other NAS machines use. Isn't Sandstorm basically dead at this point? I seem to recall them announcing that the commercial side of the project had failed and they were going 100% Open Source.
    - kentonv 9y ago
      We're still working on Sandstorm.
galacticpony2 9y ago
But where's the alternative Youtube website? Youtube differentiates itself by being a go-to platform, a website that people actually visit to watch videos. Otherwise, call it an alternative to Vimeo, which is de-facto just a video hosting platform.
- CM30 9y ago
  Well, there's always VidMe. That's what they're trying to be, a new YouTube. But when it comes to decentralised services... I suspect the answer is 'whatever instance connects to most of the others and draws the most traffic'. Which raises its own issues, since [BigVideoSiteInstanceNameHere] basically just ends up with the same problems as YouTube. Being able to control what a large percentage of users watch on a de facto level, even if the actual underlying system is decentralised.
con022 9y ago
I am confusing with decentralized. If there is no central server, how can my node find the first neighbor node? If there is a server maintain a nodes list, it isn't decentralized, right?
- obmelvin 9y ago
  Practically speaking a peer list is usually required in an otherwise decentralized system
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  Just have to find one, right? Then it can clue yours in on the rest. So manually provision any neighbor, once?
eco 9y ago
I'm not understanding what is decentralized about it. It just looks like a bunch of Gallery 2 installations. Do the servers interact in some way? Is the content hosted in a decentralized fashion? I can't find anything on the website that clarifies it.
- nnutter 9y ago
  Decentralized != distributed.
Espionage724 9y ago
For anyone interested, I have some notes on how I deploy MediaGoblin here: https://wiki.realmofespionage.xyz/servers:nginx:gnu_mediagoblin https://wiki.realmofespionage.xyz/servers:nginx:gnu_mediagob...
wedesoft 9y ago
If you are looking for a self-hosted video site, I can really recommend CumulusClips. It is quite easy to setup and does the job quite well.

610 points by huntermeyer 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

This looks like another way of sharing stuff that big companies don't want you to share. I seem to recall this story not ending well in the past. And AGPL? - such an unappealing license - it's the license for open source extremists.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Or just sharing private content you don't want the big companies to have.
- EGreg 9y ago
  AGPL is great for letting regular people host stuff without large companies taking over your project and giving it to their 100000000000000000 centralized user base.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - flukus 9y ago
    No it isn't, companies are able to do that if they want. AGPL just makes sure those companies release their modifications to your project.
    - EGreg 9y ago
      They usually have polices to not even touch AGPL.
    - quadrangle 9y ago
      Yes indeed. The implication from the other poster was that companies can't exploit the project and make derivatives without sharing their source code. That doesn't stop them, but it does make it possible for people to get the updates, self-host or create competing instances, which is a major check on the power that proprietary services have.
  - raggi 9y ago
    What projects have been taken over like this and still exist?
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    My comment refers to the notion that users of MediaGoblin can store treasured private content without it being indexed and monetized by large providers. This is true regardless of which open source license is used, and I am a strong supporter of permissive licensing over copyleft. ;) I see nothing wrong with corporations building their proprietary platforms on top of open source software as long as I'm not required to use it.
- mrschwabe 9y ago
  Interesting that nathcd's comment (on this comment thread specifially) is 'dead'. Basically he explains politely and using analogy why AGPL seems just fine and then points out there seems to be a trend of anti-copyleft on HN lately. Subsequently his comment is now 'dead'... point proven?
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Bear in mind, HN, beyond just being "tech news" is very connected to the startup culture by the very nature of being YC's. So there's a heck of a lot of business people around here, and businesses want to avoid licenses that lead to additional legal responsibility. It's particularly a liability if you're hoping another company will buy yours and integrate your software with theirs. Sometimes as an open source and privacy advocate, I feel like I'm in the minority here, along with a couple of other voices I see along the same lines as me. Though, I am pretty anti-copyleft as well. Go figure.
    - ue_ 9y ago
      Perhaps that's why my comments advocating far left ideas afe frequently downvoted, even in on topic threads. Too many businesspeople :)
wyldfire 9y ago
I disagree -- regular ol' people generate way more video and audio content than the artists of RIAA+MPAA. If you want to distribute copyrighted content, there are much better solutions to that problem than Mediagoblin. But if you want to put a video of your class lecture somewhere students can see it, it could be a much better option than Youtube. Especially if your classes discuss works of art still protected by copyright. Even though it's your right to discuss it via fair use, who wants the headache of arguing with rightsholders and Google's bots? It's AGPL specifically because it's a GNU project. shrug if you want to write a BSD one, that's your right. IMO they're not extremists. I like the BSD license a lot. But I also think that sometimes some companies exploit software developed under BSD licenses and in those cases coders and users alike lose out. For that reason I think it's very appropriate that the GPL and AGPL exist.
nathcd 9y ago
Being that this is an end-user application (and not a library), what does the AGPL matter? Would you otherwise be releasing proprietary MediaGoblin extensions? Is it just me or are the copyleft digs increasing in number lately? The little jabs seem nearly as immature as outsiders requesting that FOSS maintainers rewrite their projects in different languages.
- wyldfire 9y ago
  For the record, I think mediagoblin should use whatever license they see fit. But the distinction between GPL and AGPL here matters. If mediagoblin were GPL you could use it to host better-than-youtube.com -- and subsequently add a hardware-accelerated-3d-folksonomy feature to your better-than-youtube.com instance. better-than-youtube.com's users would be [effectively] using a work derived from mediagoblin and yet they would not have access to its source because they were never distributed the binary. GNU created the AGPL to solve the problem created by the trend of "Software-as-a-service".
  - raggi 9y ago
    If you look at some of the installations listed in the wiki they have clearly been modified. They do not provide their modifications publicly, and are in violation of section 5. This is the core challenge with user modified agpl over user modified gpl. These users are unwittingly in violation - their acceptance of the license terms without understanding them leaving them in a position of legal risk.
    - quadrangle 9y ago
      The whole GPL family has no requirement of providing source publicly. The requirement is to make source available upon request to those who are the recipients of the software. > they have clearly been modified How do you know? Mediagoblin has lots of settings and prefs to adapt how it works. Anyway, the source-provision applies whether or not it's modified. It's the responsibility of any instance of Mediagoblin to provide source upon request to visitors of the instance. The source must match what is running. Modified or not is irrelevant. > unwittingly in violation Not at all. They will be in violation if you can access their instance and you ask them for the source and they refuse to give it to you.
quadrangle 9y ago
> AGPL … the license for open source extremists. Nonsense. The sort of people who appreciate the AGPL are the sort who either say or at least acknowledge that others say "it's free software, not open source". If you think AGPL is unappealing and that's as far as you take it besides asserting it being extreme, you don't understand the basic concept of software freedom, so you can't judge when someone is extreme about it or not.
hyperdunc 9y ago
The term "open-source extremists" is somewhat oxymoronic and reminds of the term "militant atheists". In real terms, neither category is particularly edgy.

kemonocode 9y ago

I always seem to remember this project sort of limping along, only to forget it a while after as even though I'm an artist and I could make some use of it, the setup is far too much of a trouble when a Wordpress blog would do the trick for sharing my works just fine. Maybe it needs something akin to what happened with GNU/Social and Mastodon to be thrown into the limelight.

wyldfire 9y ago
I don't have much experience with it but IMO mediagoblin might suit small organizations slightly better than individuals. It's probably best for folks who want their cycling club, makerspace, HOA, scouts troop, university, etc to be able to share media without being subject to content restrictions, silly communities, etc.
- CM30 9y ago
  My question however is whether said people would be technically capable of getting it running. I mean, it's simple for those with experience in running a server or unmanaged VPS, who know how to run Python scripts and setup Docker or what not. But the average person in many of these small organisations (even the tech team) is probably confused by a simple WordPress install or even the process of uploading files to a web hosting account. I feel these solutions seem like they should be aimed at the people and groups you mention, but end up seeming like they're designed for tech geeks and programmers. They need to be made to work on cheaper hosting accounts and installable by someone whose experience with 'tech' is clicking buttons in a user interface.
  - cubano 9y ago
    While I was nodding my head in agreement while reading your comment, this sentence disturbed me... But the average person in many of these small organisations (even the tech team) is probably confused by a simple WordPress install or even the process of uploading files to a web hosting account. If a "tech team" can't even upload a file to a server, that is really a piss poor tech team and in general shouldn't even be labeled as such, IMO.

rglullis 9y ago

Curious to see this here, given that I've been trying to set up some of these "decentralized services" at my home servers and figuring out if it is really possible to replace the common mainstream services. So far, I installed my own Matrix server (synapse), my own XMPP (ejabberd), yesterday I got semi-happy with my mastodon setup, and now I was just finishing some tests with ownCloud to see if I could replace Dropbox. MediaGoblin is on my list of services to setup. I ran a basic deployment and checked some other instances of it before, but I didn't put it higher on my priority list because to me it looks like it focus too much on being a "community-driven website" instead of providing a solid service as a media-hosting/publishing/catalog system. To me it looks like they are shooting for the wrong level of "decentralization granularity". Each instance of these services are aiming for a "community", and think that the people use the mainstream tools because they don't want to/won't manage the server. The point they seem to miss is that this only creates another type of top-down organization. It would be MUCH easier for them to focus on a "single-user" system, and start from the point that the communication will work when the applications talk with each other. To me this is why Diaspora failed, and Wordpress is still such a big part of the internet. Another thing I noticed: the projects that really focused on separating client from server produced much better results in terms of UI/UX. With Matrix, I just had to setup the server, and then I could have the riot app just point to my instance. If by any chance a better client comes around, my instance would be untouched.

anderspitman 9y ago
I dabbled with ownCloud, Seafile, etc and came away disappointed. At the time I was trying to run them on a raspberry pi and ownCloud at least was too heavy. Eventually I found Syncthing and that's been the ticket for me. It's great for synchronization but not so much for general sharing.
- simplehuman 9y ago
  Did you try nextcloud?
- mikenew 9y ago
  If all you want is file syncing then Syncthing is really fantastic. I have a NextCloud installation on a Raspberry Pi 3, and getting it to work well took some suffering. If you use a MySQL database and php 7 it can actually perform pretty well though, at least for a small number of clients. A big issue with the Pi is that it shares the Ethernet and USB on the same bus, so there's a hard limit to your file access speeds. But for syncing between my own machines plus the occasional file share I am extremely happy with the setup.

flamedoge 9y ago

BitChute is another

paradite 9y ago

Is this project still in active development? The release version has not reached 1.0 but there were only a few commits in the past months: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/mediagoblin.git/log/ http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/mediagoblin.git/log/

paroneayea 9y ago
Hi, MediaGoblin co-founder and co-maintainer here. It's still under active development, though I've temporarily handed over the reigns to others while I've been busy getting the federation standard we're going to use nicely shaped up through the W3C spec process https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ That's taken up more of my last year (okay, last two years) than I expected. I'll be back in the swing of things within the next few months. We have a federation branch right now, but the standardization process of ActivityPub meant that we're going to have to retool some things before its released in 1.0! The good news is that ActivityPub is looking to be picked up by projects like NextCloud, Mastodon, Pump.io, and quite possibly GNU Social, Diaspora, postActiv. This means we should be able to have more federation working across the many federated social web projects out there. If you're interested in ActivityPub and federation generally, I highly recommend checking out the tutorial, which is baked into the spec: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview In the meanwhile, Boris Bobrov (breton) has been kindly doing the main work along maintainership while I've been preoccupied. But, I'll be back soon... and it'll be good to be back!
- mike-cardwell 9y ago
  I can't figure out what advantages ActivityPub has over email. It seems to just be a way of sending messages to one or more recipients. Email already does this. Couldn't you just stash that blob of JSON in an email body? That way, no new servers would need to be set up; everyone already has an email address.
  - reitanqild 9y ago
    Do you want server-to-server communication to depend on yhe mercy of spam filters? Or client-server communication ?

anderspitman 9y ago

I'm still waiting for an open source self-hosted alternative to Google Drive. Even just the basic functionality of a file browser, image thumbnails, photo gallery, and video player would be fantastic. Many such projects exist, and maybe I'm just lazy, but I really don't want to have to set up a PHP server in order to run such a thing. I would love something like Syncthing where you download a compiled Go binary, start up the service, and configure it through your browser. I started implementing something like this myself but didn't make it very far. The fear of eventually running out of space or having privacy/security issues on Drive hasn't produced enough pain for me to really do anything yet.

swiley 9y ago
Why do you want that in a browser? what's wrong with the native graphical shells?
- throwanem 9y ago
  You have to install them, and they have to exist for every platform where you want to use them. For cloud services, the only unambiguous win for native over web client is access to platform APIs that the browser may not use.
  - swiley 9y ago
    Someone has to install them, not always you. Someone has to install these web shells too, often not you.
chipperyman573 9y ago
OwnCloud?
- quadrangle 9y ago
  original project forked to become NextCloud (but haven't looked myself at the status of each, just assuming NextCloud is the way to go now)

symlinkk 9y ago

Why use this instead of just putting a directory on public FTP or something?

tekni5 9y ago
So you can stream videos for the most part. Also you can let others upload, make comments, etc.

rchrd2 9y ago

MediaGoblin is available on Sandstorm (eg one click install): https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/70awyqss6jq2gkz7dwzsnvumzr07256pzdt3hda9acfuxwh6uh7h https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/70awyqss6jq2gkz7dwzsnvumzr0725...

simplehuman 9y ago
It is very outdated. https://wiki.mediagoblin.org/EasyDeployment#Sandstorm https://wiki.mediagoblin.org/EasyDeployment#Sandstorm
- dublinben 9y ago
  It would certainly be better if the version on Sandstorm was more up to date, but the current version works. If you're just interested in trying it out with minimal hassle.
  - simplehuman 9y ago
    What's the point of that? There is a live demo in the media goblin site if I want to try.
    - dublinben 9y ago
      The "try a demo right now" link on the MediaGoblin homepage is just a link to Sandstorm.

Veratyr 9y ago

I think to be able to say you're a "decentralized alternative to YouTube, Flickr, SoundCloud", you really need some way to search across all the servers in the network or at least interact with them and as far as I can tell, that doesn't exist. In the tour there's not even any mention of decentralization that I can see. Is there something I'm missing? Also in terms of self hosting, something I'd really like is the ability to point it at a pile of files and have it ingest them in place. Any idea whether that's possible?

grault 9y ago
Wrt search, I guess it's seen as an orthogonal problem and meant to be dealt with by indexing / search services..
- Veratyr 9y ago
  In that case though, why claim to be "decentralized"? That to me means one large, interconnected network, which one can access through any of its members. Mastodon is decentralized; you can make an account on any server and search and follow users on any other server without leaving. Bittorrent is decentralized, you can grab info from the DHT then connect to peers and download stuff. If it depends on an index/searching service, how is the network itself any more decentralized than say an FTP server? I wouldn't call FTP decentralized.

stefek99 9y ago

Interview from 2013 - they have been around - http://redecentralize.org/interviews/2013/10/13/06-chris-mediagoblin.html http://redecentralize.org/interviews/2013/10/13/06-chris-med...

motters 9y ago

Mediagoblin is also available as an app on Freedombone (https://freedombone.net https://freedombone.net)

thunfisch 9y ago

If you're looking for a more end-to-end solution, suitable for lecture/event recording, processing and distribution with a more permissive license, you might want to checkout http://www.opencast.org http://www.opencast.org as well.

xiconfjs 9y ago

opened the first 3x live instances [1] and all videos required flash... [1] https://wiki.mediagoblin.org/Live_instances https://wiki.mediagoblin.org/Live_instances

leemailll 9y ago

Reminds me of the dead gallery project and Piwigo. Any comparison with these?

zoner 9y ago

This is awesome. The amount of censure we are getting on YT and others is ridiculous. We are a group promoting racial awareness, not something the current empire is tolerating, alas it's members are a target of modern age witch hunting. I'm surprised I haven't found this project before, but I'm sure I'll also contribute to it in the future. Just a little note if would be easier to find it if the source code was hosted on GitHub.

wodenokoto 9y ago
The only kind of "racial awareness" I can think of that is not welcome by "the current empire" is white supremacy. Interest groups for blacks, asians and a lot of other races usually get accepted by the broader society. So I am curious which group you are part of
- zoner 9y ago
  I'm white. So you like all other than white? Isn't it racist and hateful?
  - dang 9y ago
    HN is not a place for political or ideological battle, and certainly not for race war. You've posted like this before. Please don't do it again.
mikegerwitz 9y ago
> Just a little note if would be easier to find it if the source code was hosted on GitHub. For some background: MediaGoblin is a GNU project, and GNU discourages the use of GitHub: https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.html https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.html But GNU doesn't prohibit the use of GitHub for mirroring, only as the primary location for the project and repository.
hyperdunc 9y ago
Reading between the lines, I'm going to assume by "racial awareness" you mean rising white identity as a counter to the race-based identity politics in the West that frames "minorities as victim groups". Seems to me the best way to deal with this is to deconstruct racial and group identity altogether rather than jump on board and further validate it. Regardless, YouTube may often demonetize the most innocuous of content but it rarely censors it outright.

TorKlingberg 9y ago

I found a video on one of the example sites and opened it on mobile, iOS and the Google Search app. The video didn't play. That is why Youtube is so dominant. 12 years later and nobody else has figured out how to make videos that actually play.

scriptkiddy 9y ago
I figured it out. You need to store several encodings of the same file. One in webm for most cases, and one in mp4 for all other cases. If a platform doesn't support webm or Mp4, it probably couldn't play the video anyway.
- vbernat 9y ago
  Then, you have to solve the problem with how to seek in a 2-hour long video.

cdolan92 9y ago

This may be off topic, but does anyone think that there is a correlation between pop culture (Silicon Valley's Pied Piper this season) and services like this springing up/getting more attention than normal?

somedumbguy22 9y ago
I thought about this too, but it could just be something similar to blue car syndrome[1], where I'm just noticing it now because of silicon valley. [1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/153166/what-is-the-term-for-when-you-become-more-aware-of-something https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/153166/what-is-t...
cubano 9y ago
It would be pretty silly to think this a coincidence and of course <pop>culture drives all sorts of behaviors.

criddell 9y ago

This seems like the kind of thing that should be packaged to be one-click-installed on a NAS box.

nobodyorother 9y ago
You mean, like Sandstorm did? https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/70awyqss6jq2gkz7dwzsnvumzr07256pzdt3hda9acfuxwh6uh7h https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/70awyqss6jq2gkz7dwzsnvumzr0725...
- criddell 9y ago
  Yes. Just like that, except in the format that QNAP, Synology, and other NAS machines use. Isn't Sandstorm basically dead at this point? I seem to recall them announcing that the commercial side of the project had failed and they were going 100% Open Source.
  - kentonv 9y ago
    We're still working on Sandstorm.

galacticpony2 9y ago

But where's the alternative Youtube website? Youtube differentiates itself by being a go-to platform, a website that people actually visit to watch videos. Otherwise, call it an alternative to Vimeo, which is de-facto just a video hosting platform.

CM30 9y ago
Well, there's always VidMe. That's what they're trying to be, a new YouTube. But when it comes to decentralised services... I suspect the answer is 'whatever instance connects to most of the others and draws the most traffic'. Which raises its own issues, since [BigVideoSiteInstanceNameHere] basically just ends up with the same problems as YouTube. Being able to control what a large percentage of users watch on a de facto level, even if the actual underlying system is decentralised.

con022 9y ago

I am confusing with decentralized. If there is no central server, how can my node find the first neighbor node? If there is a server maintain a nodes list, it isn't decentralized, right?

obmelvin 9y ago
Practically speaking a peer list is usually required in an otherwise decentralized system
JoeAltmaier 9y ago
Just have to find one, right? Then it can clue yours in on the rest. So manually provision any neighbor, once?

eco 9y ago

I'm not understanding what is decentralized about it. It just looks like a bunch of Gallery 2 installations. Do the servers interact in some way? Is the content hosted in a decentralized fashion? I can't find anything on the website that clarifies it.

nnutter 9y ago
Decentralized != distributed.

Espionage724 9y ago

For anyone interested, I have some notes on how I deploy MediaGoblin here: https://wiki.realmofespionage.xyz/servers:nginx:gnu_mediagoblin https://wiki.realmofespionage.xyz/servers:nginx:gnu_mediagob...

wedesoft 9y ago

If you are looking for a self-hosted video site, I can really recommend CumulusClips. It is quite easy to setup and does the job quite well.

MediaGoblin – Self Hosted, Decentralized​ Alt to YouTube, Flickr, SoundCloud

MediaGoblin – Self Hosted, Decentralized​ Alt to YouTube, Flickr, SoundCloud

MediaGoblin – Self Hosted, Decentralized Alt to YouTube, Flickr, SoundCloud

MediaGoblin – Self Hosted, Decentralized Alt to YouTube, Flickr, SoundCloud