Slashdot Mirror
MediaGoblin 0.7.0 "Time Traveler's Delight" Released
paroneayea (642895) writes "The GNU MediaGoblin folks have put out another release of their free software media hosting platform, dubbed 0.7.0: Time Traveler's Delight. The new release moves closer to federation by including a new upload API based on the Pump API, a new theme labeled "Sandy 70s Speedboat", metadata features, bulk upload, a more responsive design, and many other fixes and improvements. This is the first release since the recent crowdfunding campaign run with the FSF which was used to bring on a full time developer to focus on federation, among other things."
Can you add more buzzwords in the summary please? It's too easy to read.
But WTF is it?
I can't play the video so I'm not quite sure what kind of media platform it is...other than it can't handle the /. effect.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Is there a linux version?
The last time this paroneayea fellow posted a comment on slashdot was Sunday February 10, 2013.
Since then, it's been nothing but a bunch of story submissions, mostly about MediaGoblin. I wouldn't consider paroneayea to be a member of the slashdot community, and the singleminded focus on MediaGoblin suggests some undisclosed relationship with MediaGoblin.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
The Slashdot article doesn't tell me what MediaGoblin does, or what it's for. Nether does the MediaGoblin site. The documentation, in typical Gnu syle, starts out with "how to participate" and continues with installation instructions.
It's sort of like Wordpress, but with different features and support for streaming media. There's a list of sites that use it. Of the public sites listed, all but one are demos of MediaGoblin. The first site on the list that isn't a a demo and works is this set of baby pictures. There's one site that lets you upload stuff. It's a collection of uploaded pictures with no organization.
This seems to be a publishing system for people with nothing to say.
Firstly, since OBVIOUSLY everyone here on Slashdot are experiencing the great joy of their first day online, having being raised by wolves somewhere, I'll explain.
This is what we call SPAM.
I have a number of Plex servers. Plex also allows me to publish images, music and video online, albeit to a select group of people. Were I seeking a wider audience, I'd have the options of Vimeo or Xtube or Soundcloud or Bandcamp or Flickr to put my content online.
I also have a bunch of web servers. What's stopping me from using the dozens of web content galleries, if I'm going to be using my own disk space and bandwidth instead of Google's or Yahoo's?
Seriously, what is this doing that those things aren't?
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Since this is a 0.7 release, I don't expect they have accomplished all the states goals yet, but the progress is promising.
For reminding me how the quality of comments here has taken a serious dive. I am interested in mediagoblin and was interested in other slashdotters thoughts in the new releases. Instead I find a barrage of borderline illiterate comments complaining they can't read a summary. I'm outa here so long and thanks or all the fish
You clearly have no clue what the word means.
The single most essential property for something to qualify as spam is that it must be unsolicited. Every front-page story on Slashdot is solicited. Stories appearing without being solicited is the whole point of Slashdot.
You may disagree with the editors' choice of stories to accept, but that's an entirely different subject.
In any event, this particular story couldn't possibly be more appropriate here since it's about an open source project, and what's more it's a pretty important project since it seeks to provide an alternative to proprietary systems like Facebook. Nothing could be more precisely on topic, and the new release and approaching federation facility (quite rare) is very strongly "News for nerds".
So wherever you're coming from, you're wrong, and not by a small amount but by astronomical distances.
its under your control and no censor will modify your submissions. and you own the files physically on your hdds so no private company will share them with others like state agentures.
The summary contains words, but they make no sense at all.
It is still kind of hard to get a sense of what this project is. To be honest, I didn't even fully get it until I'd managed to get it installed and play with it a little. This is my understanding of the project, someone who is more closely involved can probably correct any errors I might be making here.
MediaGoblin is a backend system for hosting "media". Part of the big idea is that "media" potentially includes any kind of thing you want to host. It's first incarnation was really just for photos/still images (like piwigo or gallery), but now also handles video, audio, "raw" images, PDF, .stl 3d models, Ascii Art, and apparently blog-style HTML text. I'm not sure if it's planned, but I'd expect it to also end up with support for .svg graphics, additional document formats (.odf, etc) and various others as interest develops. I, personally, would love to see .epub support.
MediaGoblin's main purpose is to take uploaded media and catalog it, tag it, generate "thumbnail"images, and perform any additional processing needed (such as producing legally-free format media for streaming and/or download - this IS a GNU-affiliated project after all.) It also handles authentication, access control, generation of the HTML for the pages that present the media, and so on. It is NOT (really) the frontend - they assume you have your own webserver. (There is a minimal python web-server script included can be used but it's not really intended for more than basic testing.
There is currently a focus on developing federation, meaning people can run their own individual hosts with their own login accounts, but be able to use and share media between different hosts without needing separate accounts on all of them. This will make it easy to spread out the hosting and mirroring of media across different servers in different places, which will be useful for load-spreading (like bittorrent) and for "censorship-resistance". (For a large organization with a worldwide spread of MediaGoblin instances, it could be like a Streisand-effect amplifier...)
The buzzword version of the description goes something like this: it's a unified (because this one system handles more or less all types of "content"), decentralized (because multiple independent servers can allow data-sharing and authentication with each other to prevent loss of one server from stopping access to media), federated (that's the buzzword for "one server can be told to trust another server's authentication" thing) system for hosting any "content" (or "media" if you prefer) that you want.
The short version is that it does the same sort of thing as flickr(/piwigo/gallery/picasa...), youtube(/vimeo, etc), soundcloud(/jamendo etc), wordpress, and various others, but it does it all in one interface in a way that the owners have control over so that (for example) some buttnugget can't shut off your video by just telling Google that the sound of birds in the background of your video is pirated music.
It'll currently mostly be of interest to people who are capable of operating their own servers rather than "end-users", though it seems obvious that the expectation is that people will end up using this system to set up hosting for said "end-users", whether for the general public or for use by members of some organization or other. I could imagine a university using it for inter-departmental or inter-campus media sharing and hosting, or an activist organization setting up federated instances in several countries for storing and sharing media, or a commercial start-up basing a multi-media Jamendo-style hosting company on the platform, for example.
My personal opinion: in its current state it's still too difficult install to be worthwhile for, say, a photo-gallery site (piwigo was a much simpler install on my existing webserver), but I don't know of anything similar for hosting video, audio,
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend