> I didn't put it higher on my priority list because to me it looks like it focus too much on being a "community-driven website" instead of providing a solid service as a media-hosting/publishing/catalog system. To me it looks like they are shooting for the wrong level of "decentralization granularity". Each instance of these services are aiming for a "community", and think that the people use the mainstream tools because they don't want to/won't manage the server. The point they seem to miss is that this only creates another type of top-down organization. It would be MUCH easier for them to focus on a "single-user" system, and start from the point that the communication will work when the applications talk with each other.

This 1000 times. It just kills me to think about how much potential progress has been lost to these major projects spending so much time and energy on social federation protocols instead of working on the actual primary function of the software.

Mediagoblin could have already been THE software go-to for personal media organizing and display, but it seems to be getting stuck like every other potentially great project that runs out of steam when the main developers lose their focus. And now Yahoo has sold assets to Verizon, and millions of Flickr users are wondering what will happen next.

I feel like I want to strongly agree on this sentiment but what is the concrete point here? What should be the focus of projects like these??

Just focus on being a maximally useful media hosting server, with a really simple accounts system for admins and so forth.

Make it easy for me to stand up a server, upload a video of my kid, then share the link to that video on the internet.

Leave all the community/social/commenting stuff to community/social/commenting software.

I'd rather have both an open-source media server and an open-source equivalent to twitter, than have both of them rolled poorly into one.

Not OP. But the argument seems to be: Start by being maximally useful to one person. When you have enough people using your software that they want to use it together, that's the time to start investing a lot of effort in helping them do so.

The Wordpress model - only better?

Put together a distro with a complete solution - mail server, web server, media and social servers.

Make it one-click easy to set up. Keep security tight. Maybe do some deals with cheap hosting providers.

Then federate and connect.

Isn't that what Sandstorm[1] was trying to do? It was a very cool project, but got hung up on enterprise sales and ran out of steam.

[1] https://sandstorm.io/

And still is a very cool project, just moving a bit slower now.

I just moved my calendar from a large email provider to a self-hosted Radicale server on Sandstorm (syncing with Thunderbird, and DAVDroid on my phone). Small steps, but it was surprisingly easy.

MediaGoblin is available through Sandstorm: https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/70awyqss6jq2gkz7dwzsnvumzr0725...

Oddly enough, this is what I was trying to do with my Defiant project (http://BeDefiant.io). I wanted it to be a one-step installation framework to combat proprietary systems (better description on the website).

The bad news is that I am the only person working on it, and while I am an experienced developer, I am also a grad student.

In other words it is not ready for production at all. I have presented it to quite a few people for the purpose of finding help in the development, and everyone thinks it's a good idea, but everyone also wants to see a finished version of it before seriously considering helping out. Unfortunately, I can only work on Defiant in my free time, so developing the basic functionality is steady, but slow, progress.

I love the motivation, but this is way too generic - I don't see anything that distinguishes it, for this use case or honestly for any other, from any other JS application framework I might choose, and there are a lot of other ones out there that are much more thoroughly baked than this one. (Another way to say this might be "it's a good idea, but I want to see a finished version of it before seriously considering helping out.")

Sorry to be that guy, and I know it's not a nice thing to hear. But I'd hate to see you burn a ton of time on something that's born under the cloud of "there are a million other ones just like it and no reason anyone can see why this one is worth investing effort into". I'd rather see you take all that effort and skill, find a project that's already got some momentum behind it, and get behind that and push - everybody saying "I'll build my own!" is half the reason we've got where we are in the first place.

On the other hand, maybe your framework has a genuine USP that I'm just not seeing. In that case, you'll have an easier time getting interest if you find a way to surface that, front and center, so that even the most disinterested professional engineer who's skimming HN by way of procrastination before the next code review can't help but see it.

Either way, hope this helps, and good luck in your future endeavors!

> Put together a distro

I think this is kind of a good point. It's too hard to set up these 'solves-one-thing-well'-suits to work together in the right way. Having collections of services that are super simple to set up and works well together is probably a good way to do it.

Like one media platform, one search engine, one social platform. Or perhaps having a couple of alternatives but having integrations in between up and running in a plug and play way.

Then again, if you want all this to work in a decentralised fashion you probably have to think about how to achieve that early on.

> I feel like I want to strongly agree on this sentiment but what is the concrete point here? What should be the focus of projects like these??

You could say that Mediagoblin has 2 stated goals:

Stated Goal 1) Organize and share user media, which is what people actually want it for.

Stated Goal 2) Federated social something mumble, which no real world users actually want but which free software projects seem to get big e-rections over anyway.

I think that Mediagoblin should have 1 stated goal, the first one.

All news for the past several years has been about goal 2, and I just don't think that anyone in the real world actually wants or cares about that. Most people don't even know what the hell federation is supposed to mean. People just want to be able to stop relying on Flickr to organize their damn photos. Chasing this federated social something mumble dragon has seriously gotten in the way of making the thing that people would actually use, and it's frustrating to watch because there was so much potential.

Their official linked-from-the-landing-page "Easy Deployment" page (god, I'm already terrified by the word "deployment") has bold "WARNING: OUT OF DATE" messages all over it.

Their official site for (Not-Easy) "Deployment", right at the very top, says "GNU MediaGoblin is fairly new, and so at the time of writing there aren’t easy package-manager-friendly methods to install it."

The project is now 6 years old. 6 years isn't new anymore. There isn't an installer?

Federation is important because the average web user today is less likely to regularly visit individual sites than in the past. People tend to only visit new content if it shows up in their social network's feed. So, if you create content with a tool, but that tool doesn't post the content across social news feeds where people will actually find it, what's the point?

> Federation is important because ...<something entirely unrelated to what mediagoblin does>

What problem is mediagoblin actually trying to solve? Is it organizing your media or is it being a new social network? Because one of those makes sense and one of them does not.

> So, if you create content with a...

Mediagoblin isn't for creating anything, and it certainly isn't a network client. It is (ugh, should be) a tool for organizing your media.

Know what's a really great technology for sharing media? Hyperlinks. We built a visual web that is literally world-wide using them. Know what people don't have any trouble sharing media to using hyperlinks already? All of their social networks. Know what hyperlinks don't need? Years of effort spent chasing a white whale.

Mediagoblin still has a chance to be OpenFlickr if they would just stop faffing about with things that don't have any connection to it and start focusing on core competencies and important things like installability.

I think there can be a useful interpretation for the federation idea though. There is sort of a problem with there being an over abundance of communication channels that makes the social media landscape very unweildy. Not sure if this actually address this kind of problem though.

Can be, but I just cannot see how a media organization platform has any sane role in that.

Instagram is both a "media organization platform" and social network. 700 million people each month consider that a reasonable combination of features in a single app. The efforts behind Mediagoblin think similarly.

One use case I imagine is to add media files to my local Mediagoblin instance, and then have them show up on my friends's federated social media feeds on various platforms (GNU Social, Mastodon, Pump.io, etc.).

> Instagram is both a "media organization platform"

In what universe is that? Certainly not the Instagram I've ever seen. Mediagoblin's core compentency is 10000x more like Flickr than like Instagram. Now maybe that's not what they want to make, but damnit it's what they present themselves as trying to make and failing to make major progress on.

> One use case I imagine is to add media files to my local Mediagoblin instance, and then have them show up on my friends's federated social media feeds on various platforms (GNU Social, Mastodon, Pump.io, etc.).

Look, that would be a great secondary feature to add onto an already functional and installable tool. But you make the darn tool first and try not to invent imaginary problems! Because GNU Social and Mastodon are social networks, and Mediagoblin is a tool. Do you know what you can already use to post images to social networks with tools? An authentication API and hyperlinks. Not a database redesign.

I think there are plenty of DAMs out there that address your use case, even in GNU land. But the social aspect to media cataloging, organizing, and curating is an aspect to working with digital media that does not have a GNU solution besides MediaGoblin.

It is very important to content creators that such functionality does exist. In today's world of digital media, this precise feature, which enables easy collaboration, addresses one of the industry's biggest pain points. Even the monolithic media companies struggle to implement useful solutions to this problem.

> I think there are plenty of DAMs out there that address your use case, even in GNU land.

(I had to look up what you mean by DAM. I assume digital asset manager?) Are there? What easy-to-install, modern, libre, web-based personal Flickr replacements are there? Do the work generically with many different types of media?

I don't know of any. That doesn't mean they don't exist, but I've known about mediagoblin for quite a few years now.

And the product that mediagoblin shows on their website is exactly the product I'm talking about. It's exactly the product that everyone using Flickr but who wants to be able to also include sound files or who would like to be able to migrate away from Flickr to something more free wants to use. Except installing mediagoblin is a big ol' pile of shell commands and text config files, and that's if you somehow navigate your way to something current.

Would you consider writing a blog post on all the tech stacks you tried and how it panned out? I'm kind of in the same place as you and there is just an overwhelming number of underwhelming options.

> an overwhelming number of underwhelming options

I love this phrase, it really seems to catch the problem with all these decentralised projects.

Sure I could try to set up whatever matrix/status/appnet/tent decentralised service of the month happens to be on the front page of HN but also I could just not do that and use Twitter.

The other thing is they all want to take over the entire domain you use them on. Either you have to use a subdomain (which means you can't use your cool [email protected] address) or you forfeit your domain to whatever advert the software brings with it.

Honestly I've just given up with them. I use Twitter, I use Facebook, I use Dropbox and I do things other than trying to run my own versions of those in my free time

> The other thing is they all want to take over the entire domain you use them on

That's not true. Many such projects use /.well-known/ to provide the ability to redirect from the root example.com identity to where you should actually go to send things.

Could you source that? I'm not saying it's incorrect I've just not come across it in these things yet. That'd be the key to getting me on the decentralised bandwagon

Matrix doesn't take over the whole domain; right now you use an SRV record to point to the right place and we're planning to switch to .well-known URLs. source: i work on Matrix.

As an aside, what is the current status of identities in the matrix fediverse? Last time I checked it seemed like the centralisation of identities was "punted" on and you have an OStatus/WebFinger-like system where identities are tied to a particular server.

Ah apologies mate I was thinking of Mastodon when I wrote the original comment

NextCloud / ownCloud have federation but the WebDav links are described in /.well-known/. I haven't installed Mastodon so I can't speak to it, but since WebFinger uses /.well-known/ I would be surprised if Mastodon did anything else[1].

[1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7033#page-8

I just had a brief look at Mastodon, and it appears to have the same humongous flaw that Diaspora has. No events management.

What the hell? That is the main feature required in a social network, after the ability to see each others comments. People want to organise their lives using the graph that their social network provides.

Is anyone aware of a distributed or federated open source social network which provides event management functionality? I would love to hear about it if you have... Gallery functionality would come in handy too.

I have events on my website https://jeena.net/events/ plain HTML marked up with h-event http://microformats.org/wiki/h-event and I can receive RSVPs with help of https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/

It was fairly easy to implement, the only problem is that not many of the people I know have software which lets them RSVP too, therefor I also connected it to Facebook.

Points for you for using established protocol/microformats. Very good!

Nice! what are you using for the Photos page on your site?

Basically the same, h-entry and u-photo with microformats and p-author to show that I made the photo.

If i understand what you mean by "event management", then yes there is: GNU social provides for such a feature out-of-the-box. The less-than-ideal news however is that - to my knowledge - it is rarely used by anyone. (I certainly don't use it.) But, if you have the time+inclination, try and set up your own GNU social instance and see if it works for you. Alternatively, look at some of the GNU social instances out there (see http://www.fediverse.org for list of some nodes), and try registering for an account and play around with the events feature.

Are all your friends and family on GNU Social? If not, I can understand why it isn't a good place to organise events.

Most peoples friends and family are on Facebook, so the events management feature is useful there.

I can't convince my friends and family to use a social network if they lose the ability to organise and be made aware of events as part of the move.

No doubt, you bring up a good point No, of course all my friends and family are not on GNU social...yet. My family does use my GNU social instance for communications (though we just plan things without using the events feature), but my wife in particular also additionally plans events via text. But I'm also making new friends by now using GNU social (and yes, some of my existing friends have also joined existing GNU social instances and mastodon). Maybe more will join (or maybe they won't), or maybe they will join a mastodon instance (which is compatible with GNU social instances)...or maybe not. So, you're right, GNU social (or even the compatible mastodon, or hubzilla, or friendica, or pump.io, etc.) could not be considered a panacea for your use-case. However, I would posit that this is a bit of a chicken-egg problem (as in I can't join something because my friends aren't on it, and my friends won't join until i do, etc.)...Recall years back when "the facebook" was the new kid on the block...and folks were asking something along the lines of "why would i want to join this thing called facebook if my friends/family are all on friendster/whatever-social-network-was-popular-back-then/etc.?" Obviously the choice is half yours, because you can do whatever YOU want, though you're also influenced by where your friends/family "live" online; i get that. But, here's a bit of a weird recommendation: why not set up your own GNU social or mastodon instance...and then use it for you and your friends specifically...?

> Recall years back when "the facebook" was the new kid on the block...and folks were asking something along the lines of "why would i want to join this thing called facebook if my friends/family are all on friendster/whatever-social-network-was-popular-back-then/etc.?"

And how did Facebook actually solve the chicken-egg problem you just referenced?

I'd love to get some citations for any of the federated social networking platforms-- Diaspora, Gnu Social, Mediagoblin, Mastodon, etc.-- that link to a carefully considered and workable plan for mass adoption that any of them carried out at any point in their history. For reference you can look at the Wikipedia entry for Facebook (hint: it involves universities and enormous amounts of money).

edit: remove redundant word

I haven't heard of `events management' as a core feature of social media and Mastodon gets alone just fine without it. I'm assuming that you're referring to facebook-style timelines for life events, etc.?

I'm talking about being able to create an event and invite people to it, and let them specify whether they are coming or not. This is the main feature my friends use in Facebook, other than posting comments.

And Facebook is a platform oriented towards interacting with `meatspace' friends, while Mastodon is for microblogging. I feel that `event creation' would be a significant and unfortunate scope creep considering other platforms are better-equipped to handle it.

Does Twitter have this? Honest question. If not, why are you complaining that Mastodon does not?

Twitter does not have this feature, the only platform I know of that has this is Facebook.

CalDav sort of has this stuff, and NextCloud has federation that makes this pretty nice to work with. Personally I hate the fact that 'social networks' don't actually export useful calendar information.

Diaspora issue: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1359

I dabbled with ownCloud, Seafile, etc and came away disappointed. At the time I was trying to run them on a raspberry pi and ownCloud at least was too heavy. Eventually I found Syncthing and that's been the ticket for me. It's great for synchronization but not so much for general sharing.

If all you want is file syncing then Syncthing is really fantastic. I have a NextCloud installation on a Raspberry Pi 3, and getting it to work well took some suffering. If you use a MySQL database and php 7 it can actually perform pretty well though, at least for a small number of clients. A big issue with the Pi is that it shares the Ethernet and USB on the same bus, so there's a hard limit to your file access speeds. But for syncing between my own machines plus the occasional file share I am extremely happy with the setup.

We evaluated syncthing. There is a glaring problem which the developer has chose to deliberately ignore. Couldn't move forward due to it - - https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/107#issuecomme...

- https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/pull/3527

tl;dr- Syncthing doesn't do a rolling hash implementation. Therefore, lets say you have a 1GB file. And you add a 1 line header at the top of the file, syncthing will download the entire file.

You saw that 3527 was merged in December? Is there still an issue?

merge link: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/commit/05828368200d51...

discussion link: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/pull/3527

What I do is MySQL+Nextcloud/Apache on a RPi and another Nextcloud instance on Apache on my desktop computer. Both the Apache instances are load balanced using keepalived. This gives me two things- 1. Good performance if my desktop Ubuntu is running. 2. When its not (happens when I reboot to Windows to play games), the RPi serves Nextcloud at a slower speed.

I second syncthing. It's been gloriously reliable on Linux, macOS, and Windows, even while pumping terabytes through it.

Syncthing is fantastic. It completely replaces Dropbox for folder duplication and syncing. Extremely reliable.

What exactly was the problem with Seafile? I was looking for a Dropbox alternative. Tried Owncloud and was fairly disappointed. But Seafile is working great for me (using it for ~1.5 years now).

Nextcloud VM https://github.com/nextcloud/vm sets it up automatically. Very easy to use.

Did you try nextcloud?

>"Curious to see this here, given that I've been trying to set up some of these "decentralized services" at my home servers and figuring out if it is really possible to replace the common mainstream services."

Just in case its not yet on your radar, you may be interested in Sandstorm:

https://sandstorm.io/

It bills itself as a 'self-hostable web productivity suite', but it's much broader than that, it's really a platform for self-hostable decentralised apps. Sandstorm manages security and app interoperability, so that developers and users can focus on the core functionality of the apps.

I mentioned this elsewhere but sandstorm packages are simply not updated at all - https://wiki.mediagoblin.org/EasyDeployment#Sandstorm for example. But this is true for vast majority of the packages.

Also, sadly, Sandstorm is not built for federated/decentralized apps that want to connect to arbitrary other servers.

That's not completely true. Sandstorm was built for federation, but also security (e.g. against malicious apps), and it took a while to get the right model in place to provide both. It's now possible for apps to request access to each other and to outside servers, but Mediagoblin hasn't been updated to use that feature.

Interesting the various stacks that people are coming up with for their home servers. I use ZNC, Bitlbee, NextCloud, Offlineimap + remote notmuch, mopidy.

I'm actually very happy with this - contacts, calendars, news, files - never have to go on the cloud for these things.

The uptime I've been able to manage for the last 2 years is about 95%. Most of the downtime was due to a kernel panic, a shady bios on the intel nuc, and no means of remotely restarting the thing.... had to get a "smart switch" and now my uptime could potentially hit 99%.

DR is next... got to drop my RAID disk + server combo with some friends and family. Probably slap on gluster, or just use lsyncd to synchronize changes.

We should make a freenode channel for this!

/r/selfhosted says hi :)

What are you thoughts on own cloud vs sync thing?

I use both Nextcloud and Syncthing, they solve different problems.

Nextcloud is great for easy access to currently important files and automatic uploads of phone pictures, synchronising contacts and calendars. The news app is also an excellent RSS reader.

Syncthing synchronises the bulk of my data between systems I own, it is much faster at this and isn't exposed to the risks you get with public web servers, but I cannot access those files from systems I don't own so anything I am currently using goes in Nextcloud.

It seems like neither supports encryption of the data at rest which is a showstopper for me.

NextCloud / ownCloud definitely support server-side encryption. There's a checkbox in the administration settings.

Hmm I could not find anything about that on the website. I guess I will have to reevaluate then. Thanks