The transient nature of this sort of image is one aspect that I really appreciate. Someone on foot, in a car, on a bike will run over it. Or the Sun will come to melt it. Regardless it will only be there for a short time. Ephemeral beauty has an urgency and immediacy to it.
Thanks a lot! Yeah, I developed the film and made the print myself. I really enjoy doing the whole process start to finish because I find it very meditative, and it allows for a lot of creative freedom.
Check out our new darkroom community if you're into darkroom processing or analog/film photography. I'm trying to get it off the ground, so crossposting any of your analog content there would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks for the support. I'm no expert, but feel free to post any questions you have and I'll do my best to help! Beginner questions are okay, of course.
Strictly, no. Cropped mirror-shot selfies are more Instagram than photography. Appropriate for social media and sharing with friends, but not (on their own) a good representation of the art form.
But you are cute. And I'm not trying to hurt your self-esteem. Just understand you'll be getting a lot of down votes.
With IPFS and your proprietary hosting service built on the back of IPFS.
But let's be clear, Macula is not your main product. It's a hook for you to generate a user base that you can then take to some VC firms and say "Look, we have n users! We're a real company! Give us more money for these other technologies that we built this user base with!" Namely, your "Totally not a blockchain, bro" Anagolay.
"The first pilot was focused on the professional photography market and has proved the solution's viability. As Anagolay is designed to be as generic as possible, other workflows can be developed to verify and manage the rights associated with any type of digital asset. We suggest that Kelp's proof-based IP verification & protection empowered by Anagolay could be similarly used in the music industry, video production, streaming, graphic design, and much more." - https://kelp.notion.site/Anagolay-White-Paper-v_0-3-fd9ca46a2f524e83b46ed8a0242d618d#8e2661e5640742f7adea59eb68c4d8e6
The real product, as always, is the user's gullibility in paying for shiny versions of existing products while simultaneously handing over absolute fucktons of data.
Where are your terms of service located? I cannot find them on any of the kelp.digital websites. If they are publicly available they need to be more obvious.
If they are not publicly available, why are you deliberately obfuscating them and ensuring that nobody can make an informed decision on your product before signing up?
Do said terms of service cover YOUR usage of the customer's images (such as throwing everything uploaded to you into the AI bin for processing)?
Multiple times you mention hardware verification. What, you want the serial numbers from my gear or something? This is not clear, and it's a FUCKING MASSIVE red flag for anyone that's paying attention.
What's also a massive red flag is the fairly distressing amount of basic grammatical errors. Since you're hiring technical writers on an hourly contract basis I'd be more than happy to take your money if you can prove to me that Macula is not, in reality, just a data-scraping VC pitch device.
Because it seems you're here to pump up a minimum viable product. Something that offers little to no REAL value but appears to do so. The entire idea is, of course, to get some VC firm (and maybe a couple of gullible corporate clients whose logos you can slap on your website as some sort of proof of veracity) to bite and throw a bunch of money at you so you can IPO as quickly as possible and run away before anyone notices that they bought something that already existed.
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.
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.
I'm well fucking aware of what Exif data is. I'm also well fucking aware that it's stripped from my photos when they're uploaded. This doesn't matter and has no bearing on my concern, which is that some part of your crypto bullshit ecosystem requires me to verify my gear information with you so you can verify my ownership of my images. In the context of your other projects this reeks of data hoarding, not a legitimate means of establishing ownership.
No, it's not that simple to see your terms of service given that the page you linked me to says that I have to login. Only by clicking on the login link do you finally see a ToS page. Go there and you're on a page where the hyperlinks to various sections are completely broken and try to take you to https://html.onlineviewer.net. BE MORE COMPETENT. As I said, I'll be more than happy to take your money to proofread, technically write, and generally unfuck all of the mistakes across all of your websites... including the one where you disallow copying and pasting from the terms of service.
Why? Why do you not want me to paste the fact that users can't "Disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Services?" So you want to shut down any and all criticism, as is clear by you acting like an absolute fool trying to defend your minimum viable product. Luckily it's easy to get around bullshit copy/paste restrictions so everyone here can see things like this:
By posting your Contributions to any part of the Services, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to us an unrestricted, unlimited, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, fully-paid, worldwide right, and license to host, use, copy, reproduce, disclose, sell, resell, publish, broadcast, retitle, archive, store, cache, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, transmit, excerpt (in whole or in part), and distribute such Contributions (including, without limitation, your image and voice) for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such Contributions, and grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. The use and distribution may occur in any media formats and through any media channels.
This is the type of onerous horseshit that much more competent companies than you have had to walk back time and time again. It is one thing to grant a license for usage within the confines of your site. We do, after all, have to give you permission to host and serve our content. There is no issue with that. The issue is that you're asking for permission to use our images in any way you see fit. THIS IS NOT A LICENSE ANYONE SHOULD BE AGREEING TO, especially if they aren't interested in the crypto blockchain horseshit company dropping the images they slurp up into their AI models.
Anyone reading this should make the assumption that your real goal is precisely what I stated. Create a minimum viable product (some image storage garbage), attach it to proven VC fodder buzzwords (blockchain, cloud, crypto, AI), wait a couple of years, and hopefully bullshit your way into a sizable IPO. Lampshading your VC bait by calling out how long it's taken you to create just makes you look shitty at VC bait, not like a legitimate business with a product that anyone would want to use.
You want to improve based on feedback? Here you are.
Stop hiding your terms of service. If I go to a page that tells me I have to login to access it I'm going to assume someone else, you know like the person that was here handing out beta logins, has to give me a login before I can see anything. Your landing page is trash and is obfuscating your ToS. Put the link to them on there, then unfuck the ToS page so it doesn't link to a random website.
This may be the most important one: PROVIDE EVERYONE HERE WITH A CLEAR AS FUCKING DAY, NO BULLSHIT, OUTLINE FOR HOW YOU ARE GOING TO USE OUR FUCKING DATA THEN AMEND YOUR ToS TO REFLECT THAT USE CASE. Without this being set in stone your words here (and anywhere) are utterly worthless.
Cut all of the buzzword horseshit out of your product pages. Tell people what the fucking thing does AND PROVIDE EXAMPLES rather than just assert blockchain crypto NFT synergy.
I can be a snarky asshole because I neither accepted your garbage ToS nor represent anyone but my own dumb ass. You are here to sell a product. Act like you actually give a shit about it more than you give a shit about being a douchebag. Being a snarky asshole gets you nowhere when you're responding to valid fucking criticism. You're not Elon Musk. You will never be Elon Musk. Stop acting like an Elon Musk.
Stop acting like everyone here is too fucking stupid to see how your products work together. There are quite a few of us here that are more than familiar with NFT, crypto, and blockchain bullshittery. What you've done is take and split everything off into separate component pieces and renamed them. We are not goddamn morons. You're talking to a group of people that can run command lines thirty pipes deep. Weaving disparate vaguely related programs together is what we fucking do.
Now sod off and whine about how you don't like the tone of this so you won't respond.
What somewhat discourages me from responding to the above is not so much your tone of voice, but rather seeing that you're not paying much attention to what you're reading.
So, I'll be brief.
The current ToS indeed fall short, as I mentioned earlier, and they will be changed. I appreciate you highlighting this issue and your frustration about this is entirely justified. The current template doesn't align with our approach to data handling and is, quite frankly, not up to the mark.
The rest of your comments seem to be rooted in your subjective take on what you generalize as "crypto" and appear to have little to do with the project at hand. You are simply dismissing the facts I clearly laid out in my initial response.
Of course, you have every right to be a snarky asshole, and the internet is filled with such individuals, mostly anonymous, with plenty of time on their hands and, perhaps, a lack of better things to do. So, go ahead and have fun.
Your utterly dismissive tone should indicate to everyone precisely what kind of shit-tier company you're involved with.
I have more than paid attention which is why I can see what your scam-ass bullshit company is doing.
Get people onboard with Macula, a gateway to a distributed file hosting network that lets you do oh-so-amazing things like send basic transform information in a link. You know, like HTML from a server but on a lot of servers like a torrent. (yes, I'm doing Star Trek explanations here)
Integrate that usage with Kelp, your method of creating a unique identifier for an image to ostensibly serve as a copyright notice.
Anagolay is a peer-to-peer network that stores records of Rights, Restrictions, and Proofs of any digital content. It empowers the users to store, claim, sell, and rent their work with the correct transfer of Rights and usage of Licenses.
In other words, NFT horseshit with a veil of "not an NFT, bro."
Profit at every step of the way, which is fine. That's what business do.
At no point have you clearly laid out anything that contradicts what I have said. Your statements have been deliberate obfuscation of the actual questions I have asked.
For example, I'm still waiting on an answer to what exactly you intend to do with OUR FUCKING DATA. Just saying your ToS "doesn't align with our approach to data handling" does not fucking cut it when YOU ALREADY HAVE A BETA PRODUCT PEOPLE ARE USING. Literally everything you have said and done indicates you do not actually give a shit about any portion of your company except the part that will be generating your NFT trash market.
Your company is supposed to be entirely about rights management and you can't even clearly define how you are managing our data.
Is it hard to walk in clown shoes, or do you get used to it?
Lastly, if you use a metadata checker like jimpl.org for the above images served from IPFS you will see that the Macula Unilink contains all that info to generate this page https://u.macula.link/Zd6nfwu-RgaFB453OlXmLA-7/
I’m intrigued by the idea of IPFS - but it seems to have some significant limitations…
Everything you store there is basically ‘public’. So you can only use it for things you want to make public. Which is probably fine for sharing but not so much for storage like Dropbox does. And once you put something out there you lose control over it. There’s no reasonable guarantee it will remain available, you can’t retract it, you can’t restrict access, etc.
It’s also a bit like bit-torrent in that if people stop “seeding” then it’s lost. I’ve added a number of ISOs to IPFS that I was thinking could be a good solution for archiving old software on. But they’re now no longer available.
I’m also not sure how much of a big deal “copyright protection” is. Proving I own the copyright of something isn’t the hard part it seems but rather enforcing it - which IPFS can’t do.
NOTE: this is my understanding from what I’ve seen - if I’m wrong please let me know rather than simply down-voting me…
You have a good point, let me explain a bit more how do we plan to tackle what you mentioned. As for making files public and persisting files you upload: for the beta period all files are public but once we validate the idea and improve things overall, we will also add the private storage, which will be the default option; as for storage, eventually we will give options to either use rely on us to persist the files or use persistent storage of your choice (Filecoin, Crust, Arweave) and manage it via our app UI. Regarding the copyright: it is not enforced since enforced implies taking legal or administrative actions but we can prevent a fair share of infringement in the first place by carrying the copyright attribution in the original file and all modified variants, which also makes post-enforcement actions easier. Say, you embed the image from Macula on a website and some bot scrapes it. In this case the image will still carry correct attribution. And also one thing about enforcing. Part of it requires verifying that you're the original author and for that we are developing a blockchain-based network called Anagolay, which will take care of creating digitally signed cryptographic authorship statement and will have the mechanism so that any outside observer can validate that you are indeed the author.
Hope this helps, let me know if there's anything you'd like to hear in more details.
I agree that NFTs were largely overhyped, and what we're doing here is completely different. Not every decentralized storage system is a blockchain, and neither is IPFS. Simply speaking, IPFS is a network of hundreds of computers storing pieces of your files independently. So, instead of opening a URL and requesting file XYZ, you say, "I need file XYZ; whoever has it, give it to me," and whoever has it gives it to you. This is decentralized storage in a nutshell. What we are doing here is using IPFS as storage and giving photographers a toolkit that makes it super convenient to work with it, plus quality-of-life improvements like analytics and an in-built image editor. I hope this helps dispel your doubts.
I'm interested in how sharing works. A lot of the former favorites transitioned to forcing you into their awful apps.
It would also depend a lot on pricing. I understand the issues places had just allowing unlimited photo hosting for free, but there would need to be a lot of value added beyond that before it's something I'd pay much for. I understand the business realities, but I haven't found anything with the right balance.
Good point, I'm with you on this one. The goal of the sharing mechanics is to be like a layer over IPFS that gives you additional features like adding on-the-fly image transformations (meaning you set ?width=100px in the URL and the server processes the image before showing it to whoever requested it) and analytics (which gives you the ability to see from which sources your photos are being accessed. This can also be a huge help in fighting unauthorized use -- if you see views coming from some shady site, you can immediately check it and file the copyright claim). And in addition to all this you also preserve full metadata, which (1) is useful to prove your ownership and (2) will help in further licensing since we also add metadata for getting a "licenseable" mark in Google Images.
I mean a url ending in the file type that another site (like a forum) can display in line without a bunch of other code they may or may not support.
That's the only thing I'm missing from other places. Everyone wants to drag you to their site with a bunch of peripheral display I have no interest in.
Ahhh, I see what you mean now. This is exactly our point too so once you have the link you can display it anywhere, be it a blog, comment section, git repo, etc.
Ironically I see a placeholder question mark image in line in mlem because it can’t understand your direct link, negating everything you’re trying to sell in this comment. Seems like the core concept needs a bit more polishing.
Cool. I think some of the older places I use (that still use bbcode instead of markdown) break if you don't have a file type in the actual url (I can't check any time soon), but not hijacking the direct link is a good step.
I'd be interested in checking it out. Other things that would affect me actually using it full time would be the presence/quality of any tools to organize a library and what your pricing model eventually looks like. I've been flirting with self hosting my stuff but it's just one of many projects I want to do and I never seem to have the time.
Hi, I checked the BBCode docs and examples and it seems it works with our Unified link right now, Example: [img]https://u.stg.macula.link/LHIIkEFeTTOaRo1N8Pol4A-0?w=400[/img]. Here you can see that I am passing the w params which stands for width and it renders it correctly on the playground https://codebeautify.org/bbcode-viewer
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