11–20 of 198 posts
Where does it get the list of books from? I thought that was always the biggest challenge with sites like Goodreads etc. Goodreads both (A) pulls data from Amazon, and (B) has an army of volunteer "librarians" who have additional privileges to merge duplicate books etc.
It seems that this federated service falls into the same asymmetry that others have—everyone is joining the flagship instance (which negates the decentralization).
I love the idea of more book-focused social networks! Curious what the motivation here is to make it federated, instead of focusing on high-velocity user-focused product development. My greatest gripes with existing book-social-media-networks aren't the federation, but rather the dated UX.
My step mom is in her 60s, a prolific reader, member of two book clubs and most of her friends are readers. She would never think about joining Bookwyrm because the value prop makes no sense to her. Why does anyone care about federated? (I’m talking normal people here.) Mastodon, Pleroma? What are those? Who cares? Why? (Again, talking as normal people here, the kind of people you’d talk to waiting in line for a Southwest Airlines flight to Orlando.)
“Federated, anti-corporate” — the creator of this site might think that’s important, but most people don’t care.
What does “anti-corporate” even mean? That is going to turn a lot of users off because it feels political. It’s also unnecessary as a sales tool because what would “pro-corporate” mean in the context of a book social network? A lot of the books people want to read are published by corporations. Most of the self published stuff goes through Amazon. So “anti-corporate” is what? An aspiration? Or just a tagline? Unless this is a social network for samizdat (which would actually be pretty awesome..)
Let me put this another way: A book readers’ social network is an awesome idea. Goodreads proved it could work. But I don’t understand the market problem this one is solving.
If it were me, I would probably create a network out of a specific book genre or niche, then develop from there. But “Goodreads for Anarchists” doesn’t really light any fires for me.
Still, good luck to the creators. Great to see people trying to build things!
Ok, hard truth time: My step mom is in her 60s, a prolific reader, member of two book clubs and most of her friends are readers. She would never think about joining Bookwyrm because the value prop makes no sense to her. Why does anyone care about federated? (I’m talking normal people here.) Mastodon, Pleroma? What are those? Who cares? Why? (Again, talking as normal people here, the kind of people you’d talk to waiti…
Goodreads and Shelfari both got bought by Amazon. They killed Shelfari and froze Goodreads development. As users, federation protects us from this. We even have the choice of running our own instance.