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jimktrains2

I mean, it's not decentralized. It's simply hostable.

Decentralized would be like GNUNet[1].

1: https://gnunet.org/

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We're working on federation support, and I think that would be pretty fair to call decentralized?

Decentralized can have various definitions; GNUNet is definitely one definition, but you might consider that the web itself is supposed to be decentralized and is designed to be able to be that way, but is moving away from that as more and more of the web is being replaced by megasites like YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr. So, MediaGoblin is one attempt to take back the web in that respect.

Don't get me wrong, it's good to be able to run your own software and have more than one option out there.

I just think that it's unfair to call it decentralized if each instance of it is out there on its own.

Perhaps once federation is working it'd be a more fair comparison, because at least then all the servers can communicate and share with each other.

Don't take this as an attack on your software. It looks nice and I'm sure it works well (I haven't had a chance to use it).

Look very interesting, but can you please make this more clear? I can host media files in Wordpress or Drupal - why would I use MediaGoblin? With your federation would allow my video files to be on other servers so if mine goes down, they will host the content? How does that work? Round robin DNS or just my file is copied to other servers. Can I track, update, change, or remove my media from other servers? If this easy to admin like Wordpress or does a user have to be a developer to understand the back-end processes of federating?

You can host media files on Wordpress or Drupal, but the goal here is to build an application that's very focused and tailored user-interface wise to media. Furthermore, Wordpress and Drupal alone might not very easily handle some of the extra tooling that MediaGoblin does: if you upload a video, that video needs to be transcoded; we have task queueing and infrastructure so that these things can happen in the background without you just sitting there and your browser timing out.

As for how federation will work, we may enable a plugin called "diskgobbler" or something that might dowload files, but no, by default, MediaGoblin will not mirror all files from the other sites it is federating with. :) Instead, the goal is to keep the social side of things alive: you can create galleries that have entries that span multiple sites, favoriting a piece of media can happen across instances, you can subscribe to things a-la YouTube channels. That's what we mean as in terms of what we aim for by federation.

Hope that answered a bit!

You've got it backwards. Decentralized is a distributed network of centralized systems. Distributed is a peer-to-peer network of nodes like GNUNet.

http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/unlikeus/resources/articles/...

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