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Just had a look. Unsurprisingly, the demographic of the user base is skewed to IT professionals (at least at this time). Whether that’s a good thing is subjective, but I personally want broader perspectives on literature. I think this will be a difficult problem for bookwyrm to overcome.
Let it grow for a few months and see.
Goodreads is amazing at what it is, which is an IMDB equivalent for books. Yeah, it is neglected, outdated and owned by a shady megacorporation, but I don't see any viable alternatives as of now.
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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?
No. Unfortunately, the fediverse has kind of given up on the idea of a single identity using a variety of services. Every new ActivityPub services wants to own the user account and the interactions are one way or extremely limited (likes/reposts).
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…
Wow you've got a lot going on. Do you have any stats on usage you feel like sharing? I'm curious how people have discovered this and how it has grown since this seems outside any circles I am around except HN.
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I think it’s a different view. Technical-savvy people who know how the web was conceived and thought like decentralization because it promises freedom. In my (limited) experience users just want ease of use and nice UX, and just don’t take into account the long term implications of their choices. I’m afraid, like someone said earlier, that decentralization solves a problem mainstream don’t have and don’t want to have…
I think the mainstream does care about decentralisation, but only in so far as it affects the final experience. Censorship on major social networks is a great example. People absolutely do care, but starting their own Reddit (for instance) is far outside of their abilities. Where would you even begin? They also don’t care about how it is implemented, just so long as it works. Sometime I feel like the HN crowd cares m…
To my knowledge, very few companies have found a way of monetizing decentralization in a sustainable and efficient way (I really hope someone proves me wrong with some replies to this comment).
What exactly is wrong with Goodreads? I keep hearing a lot of hate about it, but the reasons seem never expanded on. I use Goodreads to maintain a public bookshelf of books I have read or want to read. It's also nice that I can check what my friends are reading. Occasionally it's nice to read other people's views on a book. I typically tend not to agree, but it's nice that these exist. That's it. Isn't that what Good…
As an avid Goodreads user, Id say 80-90% of active GR users are female teenagers. Id suggest promoting on booktwitter or booktok instead if you want more traction. There’s also StoryGraph in the running with the same if not more features and a pretty strong network effect already, but still miles away from GR. GR is the laggiest platform I have ever used, and the tech updates are minimal at best, but people still use…
> As an avid Goodreads user, Id say 80-90% of active GR users are female teenagers. Lol, I would have said "50yo vanity-obsessed male geeks" instead, judging by the activity in my feed. I recently made a bit of an effort to use GR a bit more, to go through some of the challenges and increase my reading rates. The anglocentrism is tiring, though - all the "best" lists are dominated by mediocre Anglo writers. If I reme…
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…