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Comment by apalmer | Hacker News Reader

My biggest critique is I don't understand what it really offers, I mean as far as distributed hosting of my files, isn't that just a web server? The commenting posting CMS stuff seems like a competitor to wordpress... so i am guessing its like a blogging engine focused on media instead of text?

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Hi! Lead developer of MediaGoblin here.

I agree, the frontpage of mediagoblin.org can use some improvement. We're working on that. If you want a fast summary of things, you can still watch the video from the crowdfunding campaign we ran last year with the FSF (hell, you can still donate too!). http://mediagoblin.org/pages/campaign.html

We also have an intern helping us clean up the homepage. Things should be getting clearer soon, I think. I agree that http://mediagoblin.org/ could use some improvement.

In the meanwhile, if you're wondering what it offers, right now it already supports nice photo, video, audio, document (pdf.js!), and even 3d model support. It's written in Python, so it's easy to get hacking on. We have a lot more exciting things on the way too, most noticably federation; we currently have someone working full time on adding federation via the Pump API: https://github.com/e14n/pump.io/blob/master/API.md

This will make it so that even though there's a bunch of separate MediaGoblin instances out there that you should be able to have a lot more of the same social features of other media hosting sites as if they're in the same place.

I'm happy to answer questions if anyone has any!

When do you plan to reach 1.0 with your checklist items? What is a short summary on how federation will work? Do you plan theme-ing support?

Heya! So, it's hard to know precisely re: 1.0, but I'm anticipating approximately towards the end of the year. Federation is the big thing we're still waiting on until we consider ourselves 1.0-worthy. Probably we could have tagged ourselves 1.0 a while ago and considered federation 2.0, but federation is at the root of a lot of our goals, so...

Anyway, once all our summer projects wrap up, I think we'll have reached 1.0-worthiness, however there's a lot of code being developed right now, and I can't promise how long it'll take for it to hit the "quality approval for merge" state.

We've had theming for a while, since 0.3.1! http://mediagoblin.org/news/mediagoblin-0.3.1-a-whole-new-lo...

Read the documentation for details on that, but you can already enable a light "airy" theme if you prefer.

PS: If you're a python developer and interested in federation, you may be interested in checking out our super-awesome-contributor Jessica Tallon's "PyPump" library, which integrates with the Pump API: https://github.com/xray7224/PyPump

I know she wants more users and feedback! Pump API integration is on the way, but in the meanwhile, there's a project that's already using it if you want to try out the API: http://pump.io/

Thanks for the excellent questions! Hope that rambly response was helpful :)

What is the status of the "federation" feature? I see there's two ideas of it on the Wiki.

Will it support easy mirroring of media? Will the site be also metaservers (servers that provide the addresses of other servers), or proxy servers (they serve the content of other servers they know of)? What about the bandwidth issues (often bandwidth is asymmetric between upstream/downstream)? Maybe some form of load balancing by redirection to another server. But one would need URI scheme across all the sites... Oh my.

Also: one-click-install for Windows/Mac when?

Federation, as said earlier on here, is in-progress; Jessica Tallon has been laying down some foundations in a library we'll used called PyPump. She's updated our OAuth code to match what the Pump API expects and is starting on endpoints now. I don't have a clear ETA on when "federation will be ready" but things are moving along well. The stuff on the wiki is totally outdated, ignore it :)

Re: mirroring, I replied to that a bit here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6180159

Additionally, you can already host media files with an OpenStack Swift cloud files provider like Rackspace Cloud if you prefer.

I don't know anything about windows or macs personally, though people have gotten mediagoblin working just fine on macs... windows is harder. :) I don't have any clue when that packaging might happen though... if it happens, it'll be by someone else I guess; I just don't know anything about it.

Is your landing page your primary marketing mechanism? I think it's great that your given an intern that level of responsibility...

Keep in mind that MediaGoblin is mostly a community project. I'm the only paid fulltime employee at present (and that's thanks to the crowdfunding campaign through the FSF). It's a HUGE project, and there's not a lot of time to go around. So yes, if code's moving by a million miles a minute in the codebase and my job is to make sure that contributors are doing well and that the software is great, that might mean that the homepage might suffer... I can only do so many jobs at once.

And in any case, it's not just a "oh, we tossed an intern at this"; in this case, the person who's working on this is a community member and intern, and is doing work based on a detailed analysis based on another community member's work overviewing all our current messaging: http://lists.mediagoblin.org/pipermail/devel/2013-July/00061...

So it's not just a matter of, "oh get an intern and toss them at it"!

But hey, if you're bothered by the fact that we're a community project with not a lot of full time resources, you can donate and help us pay for more people to come on as dedicated resources! The crowdfunding campaign we ran through the FSF last year is over, but the donation link still works: http://mediagoblin.org/pages/campaign.html

Or, feel free to help us out yourself! http://mediagoblin.org/pages/join.html

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