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For just over a year we've been building
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an exciting new project for the web
called GNU MediaGoblin
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MediaGoblin is a media publishing system
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for hosting audio, video, images, and more.
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It's free software, and anyone can run it.
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... and customize it.
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It can do a lot of cool things, including supporting multiple media types,
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from images, to videos, to audio
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This means you can have all your media in one place.
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It's also built for extensibility.
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You can add entirely new media types,
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even something crazy like ascii art. Why not?
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MediaGoblin is heading in awesome directions
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to help make the web a more beautiful place.
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But we need YOUR help to make it happen!
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The internet and the web were designed
to be decentralized
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This is great, because it enables
a global and diverse voice.
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It's also very resilient; if one server goes down
for whatever reason,
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the internet still exists.
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To quote John Gilmore,
"The Net interprets censorship as damage
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and routes around it."
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But recently, the internet has been moving
in a different direction...
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Increasingly instead of a resilient web
of smaller websites
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we have larger, more centralized sites
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This has several problems.
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For one thing, the more centralized
the web becomes,
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the easier it is for organizations
to automate censorship,
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either via the centralized host directly,
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or even through the pressures
of external institutions.
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In such a system, the internet can't route
around damage any more.
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Things are much more fragile generally, too.
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In a more decentralized web,
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if one node goes out, the whole system lives on.
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But what if everyone's photos were on Flickr
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and it disappeared?
What would happen if YouTube went away?
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What would happen to cat videos on the internet?
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It would be like a cat massacre.
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This leads to a Sad Internet.
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This is why we're building MediaGoblin.
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MediaGoblin is devoted to freedom and putting power back into the hands of users.
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It's a GNU project because we care
a lot about freedom.
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And there's a lot of stuff we've done that's cool.
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We have support for all different types of media..
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...and support for more could happen soon!
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We have theming so you can make it look any way you want.
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We have OpenStreetMap Support,
so you can see where your pictures were taken!
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We have commenting and other things
that web users are used to.
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It's real software, you can run it yourself!
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Over the last year and a half,
we have had over 50 contributors
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and have made several significant releases
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This is exciting times!
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But we need your help!
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MediaGoblin has come a long way,
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but there's a lot more it really needs
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so it can be the best media hosting option
that there is.
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Most noticeably, we need federation.
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Federation is how email works:
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you and your friends might be
on entirely different servers
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but emailing between them
feels like they're on the same thing.
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We want media hosting to work the same way.
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StatusNet, the federated microblog service
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has paved the way for a lot
of the functionality we'll need...
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but serving up video, sound and images
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has it's own thorny problems
and that's why we need your help.
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We have awesome programmers,
and we know how to build this stuff!
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But MediaGoblin needs dedicated resources
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so the project can get the attention it needs.
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This is also known as the "coders gotta eat" problem.
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We have a great roadmap and we want you
to pitch in some money
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so we can hire our talented developers
and designers
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to build the pieces MediaGoblin needs
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to reach its full awesome potential.
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Developers are standing by,
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ready to give us their hours,
but we need your support.
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Thank you for listening.
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Please support MediaGoblin
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and help us make the world's most beautiful
media publishing future come true!