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Making a Simple Self-Hosted Photo Gallery With IPFS (medium.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hi there. First of all, thanks for dedicating some time to do a quick research and write your feedback. Even though your conclusions clearly show that you spent more time writing them than digging into the project itself.
I do understand where your suspicions and hostility stem from. Furthermore, I appreciate you trying to stand up for users who are being robbed of their data and content on a regular basis nowadays.

Let me start with the points where you got things right, or somewhat right.

Macula is a product of Kelp Digital, and we make this clear in all our communications. Our team is also behind other projects, like Anagolay Framework and the early version of the Kelp application, which we piloted back in 2021. We later refined and improved it, leading to the creation of Macula. All the above are not random ventures; they are integral components that contribute to a genuinely ambitious concept – one that directly contradicts the allegations you're making. We've been steadily developing these components over time.
Macula with its current functionality indeed can be considered an MVP, and we're committed to refining it based on user feedback. There's no secrecy or deception here, that's how startups function: you gotta start with something and iterate until there's a proven product-market fit and your users love the product.
Now, let's talk about Anagolay, our open-source rights management framework designed to make copyrights easily verifiable and traceable, which goes in alignment with Kelp's overarching mission: empowering users to maintain control over their content and set their terms. Anagolay, as you rightly pointed out, has its own blockchain, primarily for storing Statements (and nobody concealed this fact). However, the blockchain component isn't the standout feature or primary focus, which is evident for anyone who's paying attention. Not everybody does though, and I can understand why. The term "blockchain" has been well overused and exploited by questionable projects, making it a red flag for some people.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Now to the bits where you completely missed the point.

Photography Gear Verification. *This process is not implemented in Macula, but it was a part of Kelp's early pilot.

If you're familiar with how metadata works, you'll know that your photos inherently contain this information. Your Lens and Camera IDs are included in the Exif metadata and are typically accessible to the public unless you deliberately delete them prior to sharing. If you see this as a red flag, you can go ahead and red-flag any photo management or editing software out there.

To give you an idea, just browse some images on Flickr, click ShowExif for the selected image, and search for "Serial Number." You'd be surprised.
Furthermore, if you want to see the full metadata your photos contain, I'd suggest using a metadata checker. Macula has one here: https://macula.link/metadata-viewer/.

Last but not least, you can see how the gear verification is handled by Macula in this demo it's a bit dated, but still gives you an idea. In our case, only the copyright-related information is shared publicly. The gear ID information is hashed and only used to generate proofs which are included in the ownership statement.

To see and better understand how sharing currently works with Macula I suggest checking this comment

Terms of Service
If you were to give Macula app a try, you'd come across it just before creating your account. It's that simple, really ¯_(ツ)_/¯

With that, I should point out that the current version we have is a pretty standard setup put together with Termly's Terms and Conditions Generator. It definitely should be improved once we move forward and can allocate more resources to the matter.

To wrap up, I'd like to say that the projects you see here were mostly brought to life by just two people, with the help of a small team of contractors we assembled around the idea, who were primarily paid from our own pockets, with the occasional boost from grants. If our goal was to exploit the gullible or grab the money and run away before anyone noticed, I assure you we would have taken an easier route. We indeed could have whipped up an empty yet flashy concept, made it appealing to VCs prioritizing profits and quick exits, and by now, perhaps, we'd be signing a deal with one of the industry giants, giving up all we built to strengthen their stance.

Yet, we went fully open-source (which later proved to be not a viable way to lift up), bootstrapping, and investing ourselves over the course of three years to create a robust product with a lot of complexity under the hood. Now, once we have something to show, the point is to gather as much feedback as possible so we can improve the product further.

If you have some more constructive suggestions to follow up, rather than snarky comments earlier, I'm always open to talk.

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