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BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

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Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#21

Post by rektide »

mdoms wrote: post #14
personjerry wrote: post #10

It really feels like "federated" is to tech geeks (i.e. HN people) what "blockchain" is to a lot of non-tech people. What does federated do for me at all in solving this problem?

None of this federated stuff will ever gain mainstream acceptance. I would bet my house on it. It adds multiple layers of complexity and a ton of UX trade-off, and doesn't solve any problems for a typical user.

this worship of solving user problems pretends like the one or two companies running the big huge massive winner take all monopoly walled-garden networks are going to keep being good, going to keep doing things in the users best interest, are going to make better and better product.

it's a world view that does not click with how i view software development & progress. i see long term stewartship as hard, see most walled gardems eventually succumb to acceued bad decisions or events that they become saddled with, or poorly steered into, or simply not aligned with their users on. federation isnt an answer to a problem, it is the theory that many problems require more than one ultra-massified uber-answer. federation says that problems and their answers require experimemtation, require adaption. it believes in protocols to agree upon & communicate across people & communities with. federation is freedom to generate new interfaces & extend capabilities.

i think it's dangerous to only ask "what can help the user now". technical environments need to be diverse & potentiated, need to have creative possibilities open. federation gives us both a quick, well known, easy to adopt, easy-to-host users & communities basis, and gives us the liberty to keep exploring further. i would trade these liberties for no products, and i think users over time will see how trapped they are & appreciate living life not under the auspices of ultra-massified software titans, but instead, with smaller, more adaptive, more community based (but interoperating) federations.

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#22

Post by pharmakom »

rektide wrote: post #19
personjerry wrote: post #10

It really feels like "federated" is to tech geeks (i.e. HN people) what "blockchain" is to a lot of non-tech people. What does federated do for me at all in solving this problem?

federated means your bookgroup could set up their own instance & everyone could either post their book reviewws there, or you could aggregate your own reviews into that instance. it's the freedom to start new communities, while still being able to participate worldwide. it means that there's a protocol there, at the heart, for having multiple parties cooperating. it means anyone is free to build their own server or c…

I agree with everything you’ve said, but most users will never want to host their own instance. It might even be an anti feature, since it sounds like a bunch of work! This is not a benefit that most people are going to care about - at least in the way you have explained it.

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#23

Post by smt88 »

commoner wrote: post #15
mdoms wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this federated stuff will ever gain mainstream acceptance. I would bet my house on it. It adds multiple layers of complexity and a ton of UX trade-off, and doesn't solve any problems for a typical user.

I wouldn't make that bet. Mastodon isn't mainstream yet, but it does have almost a million active users: https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon

A million active users is at least two orders of magnitude away from "mainstream".

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#25

Post by nsim »

rektide wrote: post #19
personjerry wrote: post #10

It really feels like "federated" is to tech geeks (i.e. HN people) what "blockchain" is to a lot of non-tech people. What does federated do for me at all in solving this problem?

federated means your bookgroup could set up their own instance & everyone could either post their book reviewws there, or you could aggregate your own reviews into that instance. it's the freedom to start new communities, while still being able to participate worldwide. it means that there's a protocol there, at the heart, for having multiple parties cooperating. it means anyone is free to build their own server or c…

I'm still trying to understand how this works at a functional level.

I see you can find reviews via ActivePub services, like Mastodon, but you can only post from BookWyrm instances? i.e., you can't have one federated social identity that can post reviews and post other fediverse content?

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#26

Post by mathnmusic »

GoodReads is all but dead for many. A few months ago, they deprecated their API keys (without notice).

I started building a GoodReads-equivalent but realized that many people care more about learning from multiple media formats (blogs, videos, research papers, interactive explorables, podcasts, courses etc) rather than simply reading books. Because there are too many projects attempting to build a new GoodReads, I ended up building something more oriented for multimedia learners.

It’s up and running, open-source, built with Ruby on Rails and supports protocols like ActivityPub, RSS etc. There is a companion browser extension, integration with Slack groups, Twitter and more, and a WIP mobile app. Like GoodReads, you can build your learning lists and embed them on your sites.

It participates in fediverse so your reviews can be broadcasted to your followers on Mastodon, PeerTube etc but full federation is not yet there because it has an underlying knowledge graph that will need to be synchronised across instances.

I think many HN users may be interested in checking it out:

https://learnawesome.org/

https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#27

Post by indigo945 »

dsq wrote: post #24

Are GoodReads/Amazon and others cool about this use of their exported data? Can BookWyrm expect lawsuits? Genuinely curious, not trolling.

In the EU, GDPR makes it clear that as the user, you own the data. Companies are legally required to allow you to export your data, also in part to create more competition among platforms.

No idea about the US, though, where social platforms seem to sometimes come with clauses that make users waive their copyright (which would be unenforceable in Europe).

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#28

Post by oehtXRwMkIs »

mdoms wrote: post #14
personjerry wrote: post #10

It really feels like "federated" is to tech geeks (i.e. HN people) what "blockchain" is to a lot of non-tech people. What does federated do for me at all in solving this problem?

None of this federated stuff will ever gain mainstream acceptance. I would bet my house on it. It adds multiple layers of complexity and a ton of UX trade-off, and doesn't solve any problems for a typical user.

Ever heard of email?

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#29

Post by mathnmusic »

mathnmusic wrote: post #26

GoodReads is all but dead for many. A few months ago, they deprecated their API keys (without notice). I started building a GoodReads-equivalent but realized that many people care more about learning from multiple media formats (blogs, videos, research papers, interactive explorables, podcasts, courses etc) rather than simply reading books. Because there are too many projects attempting to build a new GoodReads, I en…

One of the cool things that the knowledge graph enables is that you can follow “topics” and get learning resources like latest research papers for THAT TOPIC in your feed - even outside the main site. This is the power of ActivityPub which is really a distributed pub/sub for the open Web. My motivation for building this feature came from the reproducibility crisis: I want to be alerted when something I believe has come under question or has been falsified.

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#30

Post by Scarblac »

mathnmusic wrote: post #26

GoodReads is all but dead for many. A few months ago, they deprecated their API keys (without notice). I started building a GoodReads-equivalent but realized that many people care more about learning from multiple media formats (blogs, videos, research papers, interactive explorables, podcasts, courses etc) rather than simply reading books. Because there are too many projects attempting to build a new GoodReads, I en…

Where do you get the books from? I'm often surprised when I start reading an obscure Dutch second hand book that Goodreads has it. Is the ISBN database open data?
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