Tangential - totally enjoyed this talk https://youtu.be/Ic_5gRVTQ_k by one of the creators of Bookwyrm.
I enjoyed this one, from their homepage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANYMii3Sypg
Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
121–130 of 198 posts
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#122What would be the easiest way to migrate my book lists from Goodreads to this (or anything else?)
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume OP is talking about the 4chan message board. Here's Reddit thread talking about said board https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/6ghfe5/have_you_guys...
The reddit discussion for /lit/ is hilarious. It's sad how even reading books has become some political thing. God forbid I like an HP Lovecraft story because it's creepy. Some of the comments have this "I like how honest and unrestricted /lit/ is, but why can't we have that without all the Nazism and patriarchy" vibe that's just so incredible, I sort of stare at them in amazement.
In case someone needs it spelled out to them: 4chan became such a great place precisely because your allowed to say what you want there. Participating is easy because you can be honest and don't have to police yourself, and as a result posting there becomes FUN.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#124It seems that this federated service falls into the same asymmetry that others have—everyone is joining the flagship instance (which negates the decentralization).
Nah, it doesn't negate anything. The flagship instance is a fine default but it's important to be able to move at any time for any reason and even to run one's own. This is itself a quality feedback mechanism and freedom.
I think this itself is the big benefit of federated services for most people. I'm less concerned with proper distribution of users across instances but rather is users always have recourse should any particular instance get elon'd.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a good start but it's still plagued by the artificial scarcity of digital copies by limiting "checkouts".
A necessary evil as long as the publishing industry continues to have a choke-hold on copyright law. IA recently lost a lawsuit trying to fight this “digital copies must be lent like physical objects” nonsense.
It's actually a lot worse than that, you're mistaken. IA recently lost a lawsuit that argued that. The court ruled that when a digital copy is shared "a new copy is made" on the computer of the person shared, so you can't even do the common practice of buying 3 physical copies of a book and digitally sharing 3 copies at any given time. It's because if you have 3 physical copies of a book, once you share it digitally 3 times, you already exhausted your privilege and not entitled to those 3 copies any more. It makes absolutely no sense, and makes US Copyright law unreasonably and extremely maximalist, even though US copyright law was already relatively maximalist compared to other countries. We live in the dark ages.
More information here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp2aowF0jUw
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#126Goodreads is a pretty bad site overall. Its good for tracking which books you've read I guess, but I don't think its better than a google doc sheet. The average reader there doesn't really have good taste in books. You are honestly better off just using a google doc to track your books, and use /lit/ for discussions and recommendations, since /lit/ has much higher quality reviews, and discussions than good reads. May…
Goodreads isn’t just for fiction or popular-interest non-fiction like /lit/. You can also use it to track any book with an ISBN. I’m in academia and am constantly reading specialized literature, and I keep track of it on Goodreads because why not. I’ve had a lot of great interactions with other users who are similarly learned and perhaps working in parallel fields to my own. If you aren’t limited to the mainstream part of the website where mob behavior rules, you will be interacting with very different – and frankly much more worthwhile – people.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://OpenLibrary.org is Internet Archive's initiative to solve this once and for all. Plus it lets you borrow e-books.
This is a good start but it's still plagued by the artificial scarcity of digital copies by limiting "checkouts".
This unfortunately isn't up to them, its the publishers that are enforcing this arbitrary restriction. In fact, IA landed in some preeeety hot water recently for fudging the rules on this very thing [0]. If the IA could get away with handling out an infinite amount of e-books I'm sure they absolutely would.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/03/26/1166101459/internet-archive-l...
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#128Ok, 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…
>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. A free site to discuss books with others doesn't make sense to her? The first line on their website says "BookWyrm is a social network for tracking your reading, talking about books, writing reviews, and discovering what…
Actually, even before that line they have a much more prominent subtitle: "Social Reading and Reviewing, Decentralized".
So it does seem that the federated nature is what they consider their main unique selling point for everyone, it's not just a framing for the HN audience.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, it doesn't negate anything. The flagship instance is a fine default but it's important to be able to move at any time for any reason and even to run one's own. This is itself a quality feedback mechanism and freedom.
I think this itself is the big benefit of federated services for most people. I'm less concerned with proper distribution of users across instances but rather is users always have recourse should any particular instance get elon'd.
Exactly... and they will. The drama always boils up and even if it doesn't, people die and such.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But how big of a demand is there for that? I think every Goodreads or Shelfari user would benefit from the service not being dead.
Definitely. I hate that Shelfari is dead and that Goodreads sucks. That's why I clicked on this comment thread. But what should convince me that this product will not be dead? Sure, I believe that it won't be killed by Amazon in particular, but why should I be convinced that it will survive on its own terms?
i suppose you could start by not coming into threads and shitting on it sight unseen but instead look at ways you can make it better, so that you can have an alternative to shlfari and goodreads.