How would a typical use case look like: Set up a mediagoblin instance to share vacation photos and videos with your friends?
This serves us in many ways. For instance, we have all of the pictures in one place, not spread over many services depending on where family members post them -- although some family members also post to facebook :( For the grandmothers and grandfathers we just give them the url instead of trying to explain a YouTube channel to them. They know how urls work, not how YouTube works.
This also serves as a backup. The server is hosted outside our apartment so the pictures we put there can be easily fetched in case something happens to our apartment (and computers - but this can also be fixed with a backup server, this is a side effect).
Basically, family album in one place -- no matter who the photographer is (and backup).
The pictures/videos we want to keep (would not want to lose in a fire) we upload to our MediaGoblin instance. MediaGoblin saves them in a folder on the server (the original media files and the processed ones). If something happens to our home, we'll be able to easily fetch the most precious images from the server.
The only thing I'd have to work around is that every media file is stored in a separate folder along with the processed files so I would have to write a script to "go into each folder and fetch the file that doesn't end with medium.[ext] and thumbnail.[ext]". Come to think of it, it might be worth it to just write a "Download all originals" plugin since MediaGoblin already knows the originals... but since our apartment hasn't been destroyed I'm not in a hurry.
No more have your videos removed without explanation because you had some radio barely audible in the background or some other idiotic issues
1. there will be not many people watching it to begin with.
2. even if there are, it's distributed across so many media goblins install. break down youtube access for (1/3 * number of videos they have) = number of different DMCA requests the MAFIAA lawyers will have to work out. It just will not scale as it does now.