Thanks for linking to those. The tour page, sadly, is pretty out of date... the screenshots they show don't reflect reality! Things look a lot nicer now I think.

See also the video from the campaign page, which describes things better than the actual site: http://mediagoblin.org/pages/campaign.html

Unfortunately the site is in bad need of updating; there's so much going on in the codebase right now that it's been hard to prioritize. Luckily we now have an intern who is going to be taking on that work!

And yes, independent instances will be able to talk to each other soon. We have an Outreach Program for Women participant actively working on federation via the Pump API! https://github.com/e14n/pump.io/blob/master/API.md

That's not all that's going on alone, but you can get some sense of what else is happening by checking out: http://mediagoblin.org/news/summer-of-awesome.html