6 ms·

> 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 se

> 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. This 1000 times. It just kills me to think about how much potential progress has been lost to these major projects spending so much time and energy on social federation protocols instead of working on the actual primary function of the software. Mediagoblin could have already been THE software go-to for personal media organizing and display, but it seems to be getting stuck like every other potentially great project that runs out of steam when the main developers lose their focus. And now Yahoo has sold assets to Verizon, and millions of Flickr users are wondering what will happen next.

worldsayshi 9y ago
I feel like I want to strongly agree on this sentiment but what is the concrete point here? What should be the focus of projects like these??
- throwanem 9y ago
  Not OP. But the argument seems to be: Start by being maximally useful to one person. When you have enough people using your software that they want to use it together, that's the time to start investing a lot of effort in helping them do so.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    The Wordpress model - only better? Put together a distro with a complete solution - mail server, web server, media and social servers. Make it one-click easy to set up. Keep security tight. Maybe do some deals with cheap hosting providers. Then federate and connect.
    - worldsayshi 9y ago
      > Put together a distro I think this is kind of a good point. It's too hard to set up these 'solves-one-thing-well'-suits to work together in the right way. Having collections of services that are super simple to set up and works well together is probably a good way to do it. Like one media platform, one search engine, one social platform. Or perhaps having a couple of alternatives but having integrations in between up and running in a plug and play way. Then again, if you want all this to work in a decentralised fashion you probably have to think about how to achieve that early on.
    - edraferi 9y ago
      Isn't that what Sandstorm[1] was trying to do? It was a very cool project, but got hung up on enterprise sales and ran out of steam. [1] https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/
      - ar-jan 9y ago
        And still is a very cool project, just moving a bit slower now. I just moved my calendar from a large email provider to a self-hosted Radicale server on Sandstorm (syncing with Thunderbird, and DAVDroid on my phone). Small steps, but it was surprisingly easy.
      - cheshire_cat 9y ago
        MediaGoblin is available through Sandstorm: https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/70awyqss6jq2gkz7dwzsnvumzr07256pzdt3hda9acfuxwh6uh7h https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/70awyqss6jq2gkz7dwzsnvumzr0725...
    - coreyp_1 9y ago
      Oddly enough, this is what I was trying to do with my Defiant project (http://BeDefiant.io http://BeDefiant.io). I wanted it to be a one-step installation framework to combat proprietary systems (better description on the website). The bad news is that I am the only person working on it, and while I am an experienced developer, I am also a grad student. In other words it is not ready for production at all. I have presented it to quite a few people for the purpose of finding help in the development, and everyone thinks it's a good idea, but everyone also wants to see a finished version of it before seriously considering helping out. Unfortunately, I can only work on Defiant in my free time, so developing the basic functionality is steady, but slow, progress.
- s_kilk 9y ago
  Just focus on being a maximally useful media hosting server, with a really simple accounts system for admins and so forth. Make it easy for me to stand up a server, upload a video of my kid, then share the link to that video on the internet. Leave all the community/social/commenting stuff to community/social/commenting software. I'd rather have both an open-source media server and an open-source equivalent to twitter, than have both of them rolled poorly into one.
- BugsJustFindMe 9y ago
  > I feel like I want to strongly agree on this sentiment but what is the concrete point here? What should be the focus of projects like these?? You could say that Mediagoblin has 2 stated goals: Stated Goal 1) Organize and share user media, which is what people actually want it for. Stated Goal 2) Federated social something mumble, which no real world users actually want but which free software projects seem to get big e-rections over anyway. I think that Mediagoblin should have 1 stated goal, the first one. All news for the past several years has been about goal 2, and I just don't think that anyone in the real world actually wants or cares about that. Most people don't even know what the hell federation is supposed to mean. People just want to be able to stop relying on Flickr to organize their damn photos. Chasing this federated social something mumble dragon has seriously gotten in the way of making the thing that people would actually use, and it's frustrating to watch because there was so much potential. Their official linked-from-the-landing-page "Easy Deployment" page (god, I'm already terrified by the word "deployment") has bold "WARNING: OUT OF DATE" messages all over it. Their official site for (Not-Easy) "Deployment", right at the very top, says "GNU MediaGoblin is fairly new, and so at the time of writing there aren’t easy package-manager-friendly methods to install it." The project is now 6 years old. 6 years isn't new anymore. There isn't an installer?
  - worldsayshi 9y ago
    I think there can be a useful interpretation for the federation idea though. There is sort of a problem with there being an over abundance of communication channels that makes the social media landscape very unweildy. Not sure if this actually address this kind of problem though.
    - BugsJustFindMe 9y ago
      Can be, but I just cannot see how a media organization platform has any sane role in that.
      - dublinben 9y ago
        Instagram is both a "media organization platform" and social network. 700 million people each month consider that a reasonable combination of features in a single app. The efforts behind Mediagoblin think similarly. One use case I imagine is to add media files to my local Mediagoblin instance, and then have them show up on my friends's federated social media feeds on various platforms (GNU Social, Mastodon, Pump.io, etc.).
AndrewUnmuted 9y ago
I think there are plenty of DAMs out there that address your use case, even in GNU land. But the social aspect to media cataloging, organizing, and curating is an aspect to working with digital media that does not have a GNU solution besides MediaGoblin. It is very important to content creators that such functionality does exist. In today's world of digital media, this precise feature, which enables easy collaboration, addresses one of the industry's biggest pain points. Even the monolithic media companies struggle to implement useful solutions to this problem.
- BugsJustFindMe 9y ago
  > I think there are plenty of DAMs out there that address your use case, even in GNU land. (I had to look up what you mean by DAM. I assume digital asset manager?) Are there? What easy-to-install, modern, libre, web-based personal Flickr replacements are there? Do the work generically with many different types of media? I don't know of any. That doesn't mean they don't exist, but I've known about mediagoblin for quite a few years now. And the product that mediagoblin shows on their website is exactly the product I'm talking about. It's exactly the product that everyone using Flickr but who wants to be able to also include sound files or who would like to be able to migrate away from Flickr to something more free wants to use. Except installing mediagoblin is a big ol' pile of shell commands and text config files, and that's if you somehow navigate your way to something current.

worldsayshi 9y ago

I feel like I want to strongly agree on this sentiment but what is the concrete point here? What should be the focus of projects like these??

throwanem 9y ago
Not OP. But the argument seems to be: Start by being maximally useful to one person. When you have enough people using your software that they want to use it together, that's the time to start investing a lot of effort in helping them do so.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  The Wordpress model - only better? Put together a distro with a complete solution - mail server, web server, media and social servers. Make it one-click easy to set up. Keep security tight. Maybe do some deals with cheap hosting providers. Then federate and connect.
  - worldsayshi 9y ago
    > Put together a distro I think this is kind of a good point. It's too hard to set up these 'solves-one-thing-well'-suits to work together in the right way. Having collections of services that are super simple to set up and works well together is probably a good way to do it. Like one media platform, one search engine, one social platform. Or perhaps having a couple of alternatives but having integrations in between up and running in a plug and play way. Then again, if you want all this to work in a decentralised fashion you probably have to think about how to achieve that early on.
  - edraferi 9y ago
    Isn't that what Sandstorm[1] was trying to do? It was a very cool project, but got hung up on enterprise sales and ran out of steam. [1] https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/
    - ar-jan 9y ago
      And still is a very cool project, just moving a bit slower now. I just moved my calendar from a large email provider to a self-hosted Radicale server on Sandstorm (syncing with Thunderbird, and DAVDroid on my phone). Small steps, but it was surprisingly easy.
    - cheshire_cat 9y ago
      MediaGoblin is available through Sandstorm: https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/70awyqss6jq2gkz7dwzsnvumzr07256pzdt3hda9acfuxwh6uh7h https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/70awyqss6jq2gkz7dwzsnvumzr0725...
  - coreyp_1 9y ago
    Oddly enough, this is what I was trying to do with my Defiant project (http://BeDefiant.io http://BeDefiant.io). I wanted it to be a one-step installation framework to combat proprietary systems (better description on the website). The bad news is that I am the only person working on it, and while I am an experienced developer, I am also a grad student. In other words it is not ready for production at all. I have presented it to quite a few people for the purpose of finding help in the development, and everyone thinks it's a good idea, but everyone also wants to see a finished version of it before seriously considering helping out. Unfortunately, I can only work on Defiant in my free time, so developing the basic functionality is steady, but slow, progress.
s_kilk 9y ago
Just focus on being a maximally useful media hosting server, with a really simple accounts system for admins and so forth. Make it easy for me to stand up a server, upload a video of my kid, then share the link to that video on the internet. Leave all the community/social/commenting stuff to community/social/commenting software. I'd rather have both an open-source media server and an open-source equivalent to twitter, than have both of them rolled poorly into one.
BugsJustFindMe 9y ago
> I feel like I want to strongly agree on this sentiment but what is the concrete point here? What should be the focus of projects like these?? You could say that Mediagoblin has 2 stated goals: Stated Goal 1) Organize and share user media, which is what people actually want it for. Stated Goal 2) Federated social something mumble, which no real world users actually want but which free software projects seem to get big e-rections over anyway. I think that Mediagoblin should have 1 stated goal, the first one. All news for the past several years has been about goal 2, and I just don't think that anyone in the real world actually wants or cares about that. Most people don't even know what the hell federation is supposed to mean. People just want to be able to stop relying on Flickr to organize their damn photos. Chasing this federated social something mumble dragon has seriously gotten in the way of making the thing that people would actually use, and it's frustrating to watch because there was so much potential. Their official linked-from-the-landing-page "Easy Deployment" page (god, I'm already terrified by the word "deployment") has bold "WARNING: OUT OF DATE" messages all over it. Their official site for (Not-Easy) "Deployment", right at the very top, says "GNU MediaGoblin is fairly new, and so at the time of writing there aren’t easy package-manager-friendly methods to install it." The project is now 6 years old. 6 years isn't new anymore. There isn't an installer?
- worldsayshi 9y ago
  I think there can be a useful interpretation for the federation idea though. There is sort of a problem with there being an over abundance of communication channels that makes the social media landscape very unweildy. Not sure if this actually address this kind of problem though.
  - BugsJustFindMe 9y ago
    Can be, but I just cannot see how a media organization platform has any sane role in that.
    - dublinben 9y ago
      Instagram is both a "media organization platform" and social network. 700 million people each month consider that a reasonable combination of features in a single app. The efforts behind Mediagoblin think similarly. One use case I imagine is to add media files to my local Mediagoblin instance, and then have them show up on my friends's federated social media feeds on various platforms (GNU Social, Mastodon, Pump.io, etc.).

AndrewUnmuted 9y ago

I think there are plenty of DAMs out there that address your use case, even in GNU land. But the social aspect to media cataloging, organizing, and curating is an aspect to working with digital media that does not have a GNU solution besides MediaGoblin. It is very important to content creators that such functionality does exist. In today's world of digital media, this precise feature, which enables easy collaboration, addresses one of the industry's biggest pain points. Even the monolithic media companies struggle to implement useful solutions to this problem.

BugsJustFindMe 9y ago
> I think there are plenty of DAMs out there that address your use case, even in GNU land. (I had to look up what you mean by DAM. I assume digital asset manager?) Are there? What easy-to-install, modern, libre, web-based personal Flickr replacements are there? Do the work generically with many different types of media? I don't know of any. That doesn't mean they don't exist, but I've known about mediagoblin for quite a few years now. And the product that mediagoblin shows on their website is exactly the product I'm talking about. It's exactly the product that everyone using Flickr but who wants to be able to also include sound files or who would like to be able to migrate away from Flickr to something more free wants to use. Except installing mediagoblin is a big ol' pile of shell commands and text config files, and that's if you somehow navigate your way to something current.