So it's an excellent opportunity for up and coming designers to contribute to a promising open source project.

The architecture is also fundamentally flawed.

How many people want to be the SysAdmin for all 2.0 services for their entire extended family? We need self-organizing systems, not federation.

It's a legitimate complaint that syadmin'ing all these services is a lot of work, but I think that's actually an argument for working to make deployment of services such as MediaGoblin easier. Right now deploying web applications is hard... if we could get things at least to the point of deploying and maintaining systems are "as easy" (note the quotes) as "apt-get install" and "apt-get upgrade" then we'd be in a much better state. But there's a lot of work happening right now towards abstracting deployment; I think if we can turn some of that effort towards generalizing deployment recipies for everyone (not just people running big clusters of servers) we could make big improvement here. Projects like JuJu and OpenShift are probably the right directions, but admittedly I haven't had enough time to spend playing with them.

How many people want to be the sysadmin for all the apps on their phone? Remember, phones are now running Unix.

It's possible to make installing this stuff easier.

What do you mean by "self-organizing system"?

Definitely! We have a lead graphic designer and nearly 50 programmers. As you can imagine that graphic designer is overstretched. Do you know any graphic designers who are interested in helping make MediaGoblin nicer? Point them our way, we'd love to talk to them! http://mediagoblin.org/pages/join.html

I always wonder how many open source projects actually look like they do because the creators choose, and like those certain styles.

As a designer there is only that much you can do if you don't get support, or get conflicting views from the client (= all the contributors in the project).

Your comment reminds me of the line from Meet the Feebles: "No. That's lousy."

I'm not the creator, but perhaps you could offer 1 (or 2!) actionable critiques? For example, you mentioned the navigation path. Where did you get stuck?

"Seriously, what an amatuerish-looking mess. White text on black, no clear navigation path, I can't imagine any random end user actually using one of these sites."

You could say the same thing about MS-DOS, but if it gets the job done it will get used. The most important thing is functionality, not UI. After all, you can't polish a turd.

What exactly is the functionality though? They don't make it obvious - it looks like any of 1,000 generic photo sharing sites. It doesn't make any sort of compelling value proposition. What makes it so special to be worthy of being a GNU project?

UI is functionality.

>You could say the same thing about MS-DOS

And maybe that's why nobody uses it anymore.

If you want to compare, compare to something current. MS DOS was not that amateurish looking for its age and its user base at the time.

(nobody as in "mostly outliers", for you pedants)

You are the worst kind of HN user.

The name is the best part of it. People like globins.

I would use MediaGlobulin.