GNU MediaGoblin (also shortened to MediaGoblin or GMG) is a

free Free may refer to: Concept * Freedom, the ability to act or change without constraint or restriction * Emancipate, attaining civil and political rights or equality * Free (''gratis''), free of charge * Gratis versus libre, the difference betw ...

decentralized Decentralization or decentralisation is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those related to planning and decision-making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group and gi ...

Web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

platform (server software) for hosting and sharing many forms of

digital media In mass communication, digital media is any media (communication), communication media that operates in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital content can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, an ...

. It strives to provide an extensible, federated, and freedom-respectful

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

alternative to major media publishing services such as

Flickr Flickr ( ) is an image hosting service, image and Online video platform, video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was previously a co ...

DeviantArt DeviantArt (formerly styled as deviantART and thus abbreviated as dA) is an American online community that features artwork, videography, photography, and literature, launched on August 7, 2000, by Mathew Stephens, Scott Jarkoff and Angelo Sotir ...

, and

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

History

The origins of GNU MediaGoblin date back to 2008, when a gathering was held at the

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985. The organisation supports the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...

in order to discuss the path that Internet communities should take. The answer was that restrictive and centralized structures were both technically and ethically doubtful, and may harm the typical fairness and availability of the Internet. Several projects have since appeared to prevent this, including

Identi.ca identi.ca is a free and open-source social networking and blogging service based on the pump.io software, using the Activity Streams protocol. Identi.ca stopped accepting new registrations in 2013, but continues to operate alongside several o ...

Libre.fm Libre.fm is a music community website that aims to provide a free software replacement for last.fm. The website was founded in 2009 by Matt Lee. Libre.fm can optionally store a user's listening habits using information sent to the website's se ...

Diaspora A diaspora ( ) is a population that is scattered across regions which are separate from its geographic place of birth, place of origin. The word is used in reference to people who identify with a specific geographic location, but currently resi ...

, among others. The MediaGoblin project remains in active development.

Design and features

MediaGoblin is part of

GNU GNU ( ) is an extensive collection of free software (394 packages ), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popu ...

, and its code is released under the terms of the

GNU Affero General Public License The GNU Affero General Public License (GNU AGPL) is a free, copyleft license published by the Free Software Foundation in November 2007, and based on the GNU GPL version 3 and the ''Affero General Public License'' (non-GNU). It is intended fo ...

; meaning that it adheres to the principles of

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free ...

. The licensing of other elements (e.g. design, logo) is under the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

Christine Lemmer-Webber Christine Lemmer-Webber (born September 26, 1984) is an American software engineer, best known for her lead authorship and co-editorship of ActivityPub. She is currently the Executive Director at Spritely Institute. Career In the early 2000s ...

, the core developer, came up with the name "MediaGoblin" which also makes a pun with the pronunciation of "gobbling". The main page displays an upper banner with MediaGoblin's typeface and an authentication section for users. The remaining space is left to show

thumbnail Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures or videos, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. In the age of digital images, visual search engines and image-o ...

s of the latest posted works. Each user owns a personal profile comprised by two vertical sections – one for uploads arranged as a gallery and another with a customizable text box. For displaying media, the platform focuses on the work itself rather than overstocking with options and buttons; nonetheless, comments can be added under the artwork description. Some other features like tags,

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

, theming,

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

licensing and

GPS The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based hyperbolic navigation system owned by the United States Space Force and operated by Mission Delta 31. It is one of the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) that provide geol ...

support can be enabled as separate plug-ins to enrich the usage of GNU MediaGoblin. MediaGoblin 0

The platform successfully hosts and displays many sorts of media: * As of version 0.3.1 it includes support for plain text (

ASCII art ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) character (computing), characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCI ...

), images (

PNG Portable Network Graphics (PNG, officially pronounced , colloquially pronounced ) is a raster-graphics file format that supports lossless data compression. PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange ...

and

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

). *

HTML5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...

capabilities are widely used to play video and/or audio contained in

WebM WebM is an audiovisual media file format. It is primarily intended to offer a royalty-free alternative to use in the HTML video and the HTML audio elements. It has a sister project, WebP, for images. The development of the format is sponsored by ...

format; while

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software ...

, WAV and MP3 uploads are automatically transcoded to Vorbis audio and then encapsulated into WebM. * 3D models support (preview and renderization) was added on 22 October 2012 and is achieved by means of HTML5 Canvas, Thingiview,

WebGL WebGL (short for Web Graphics Library) is a JavaScript Application programming interface, API for rendering interactive 2D and 3D graphics within any compatible web browser without the use of plug-in (computing), plug-ins. WebGL is fully integra ...

and

Blender A blender (sometimes called a mixer (from Latin ''mixus, the PPP of miscere eng. to Mix)'' or liquidiser in British English) is a kitchen and laboratory appliance used to mix, crush, purée or emulsify food and other substances. A stationary ...

Mascot

The project mascot is a purple goblin called

Gavroche Gavroche () is a fictional character in the 1862 novel ''Les Misérables'' by Victor Hugo. He is a boy who lives on the streets of Paris. His name has become a synonym for an urchin or Street children, street child. Gavroche plays a short yet si ...

wearing clothing that resembles a stereotypical artist costume.

References

External links

{{Commons category, GNU MediaGoblin
GNU MediaGoblin website
Free content management systems Free image galleries Free server software GNU Project software Internet services supporting OpenID Software using the GNU Affero General Public License Video hosting software Web hosting Fediverse

History

Design and features

Mascot

See also

References

External links