About 16 months after raising $42k to feed the programmers (my post about that campaign), the MediaGoblin team is asking again, with promised features dependent on the total amount raised.
I’m pretty excited about three features. First, at $35k:
Federation: Connect and share with friends and family even if you’re on different MediaGoblin sites! We’ll be adding federation support via the Pump API.
Mostly because this would be a boost to the so far disappointing and fractured federated social web.
Second:
[UNLOCK] Premium hosting reward! If we hit 60k, we’ll add a new reward option: premium hosting!
Doesn’t federation make hosting superfluous? Everyone should run their own server, right? No, those are extremely delusional or elitist claims. I don’t want to run my own server, nor do 7 billion others. Federation (preferably in conjunction with free software, data and identifier portability) enables interoperation and competition among individual-, community-, and commercially-run services. At this stage there seem to be very significant economies of scale (inclusive of marketing!) in running servers. Hopefully someone (the developers would be natural) will realize the necessity of mass hosting of federated services for federation to win.
[statement] After watching the new MediaGoblin video, i want to play their video game.
[response] I’ve joked about putting a goblin video game as a 500k feature unlock
Here I just wanted to point out how much of MediaGoblin lead developer Christopher Webber’s personality and vision is in the campaign video, assets, and overall scheme. That vision goes pretty far beyond federated media hosting. Free games and art are part of it. But a MediaGoblin game would be a great marketing tie-in solely for the goal of promoting MediaGoblin. I hope this happens; $500k this campaign would be great, but under other circumstances if not.
