131–140 of 198 posts
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Its the image of a bunch of book covers. Better to have them together in one image than separate images. https://joinbookwyrm.com/static/images/book-grid.png
It features several photographs, it probably should've been a jpg at least.
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Consumers want centralisation. All of this stuff is too complicated right now for end-users. In an ideal world, my data would live on the instance but as soon as its mutated a local copy is sync'd through the browser/app. That way it's my data, and if the instance goes down, I can choose to sync it somewhere else. Ideally this would be packaged up in one application, so for different kinds of "sites" the mechanism fo…
> Consumers want centralisation. Consumers want to not care about the details. Most people don't care much about federation, p2p, full decentralization or centralization, until something crashes. As long as they have no problems, they would even play with the devil. Centralized solutions, tend to be easier in usage, faster, and with a more stable moderation who maintains the peace. This is something decentralized sol…
You are partly correct. They do not care about details, but they want things as simple as possible, and decentralization makes that harder. See all people complaining (or don't understanding) about having to choose a mastodon or lemmy instance.
And copy+pasting usernames/post links that you have open, to search for it again on your own instance so you can reply... is not simplicity.
I can only guess as mass readers tried to migrate to bookwyrm, how many people would be complaining that they are trying to add a book a friend is reading, but it's not showing for them - because it's registered on another instance but they didn't realize
Or why they see different ratings, or less number of reviews than their friends
AS far as tracking is concerned, Goodreads works fine for me. I am not sure why should I use it.
One good reason might be more data ownership than tracking. Centralized platforms seem to at some point realize how valuable their user’s contributions to the site are, and change the deal eventually to e.g. lock things behind a paywall when they grow bold and/or can get away with it. Reddit and Twitter are two high-profile examples of this, but there are numerous examples from the past as well for things like nutrit…
Other than being distributed which is interesting, how does this differ from https://www.librarything.com/ ?
If I had to guess (I'm probably not going to sign up), LT centres books while this seems to centre reading. So a bit less "database for books", a bit more "social media for reading"?
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https://OpenLibrary.org is Internet Archive's initiative to solve this once and for all. Plus it lets you borrow e-books.
Wow, I just realized Open Library covers like 80% of Goodreads as well: read/to-read lists, ratings, yearly reading goals. Seems like https://openlibrary.org itself would be a fine Goodreads alternative if you don't want to set up your own Bookwyrm instance.
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This is a good start but it's still plagued by the artificial scarcity of digital copies by limiting "checkouts".
Copyright law is a plague on contemporary free society. I'm a composer, I work on contemporary Western classical music, and finding written music published since 1923 is a full-time job in itself. It's relatively easy (still not easy) to find extremely famous composers (e.g. Philip Glass, Gyorg Ligeti, Jennifer Higdon etc), but if you're trying to find someone lesser known, or god forbid someone unknown published by…
One of the most striking developments in the last 20 years is that so many of those European publishers are making a lot of their study scores free to read online. Apparently they have given up trying to make money from ordinary music lovers and are OK with selling just to performers and libraries. Back when I became a huge fan of a somewhat lesser-known European avant-garde composer, I despaired that it would cost many, many thousands of euro to buy the study scores of all his pieces. Now they are right there for free on the publisher’s website.
Otherwise, piracy largely fills the gap, although many composers have some famous piece, the score of which is impossible to ever see. Boulez’s Répons and …explosante-fixe… are my usual examples of this – all the rest of his scores have circulated in pirate circles for well over a decade. Someting like Magnus Lindberg’s KRAFT is probably not easily found because its score is a meter tall and therefore difficult to scan.
AS far as tracking is concerned, Goodreads works fine for me. I am not sure why should I use it.
One good reason might be more data ownership than tracking. Centralized platforms seem to at some point realize how valuable their user’s contributions to the site are, and change the deal eventually to e.g. lock things behind a paywall when they grow bold and/or can get away with it. Reddit and Twitter are two high-profile examples of this, but there are numerous examples from the past as well for things like nutrit…
I don’t believe that Amazon considers users’ contributions to Goodreads valuable, it only bought the site to 1) stop paying Amazon Associates referral fees to the independent corporation that Goodreads was, and 2) to stop Goodreads from directing any book-sale traffic to its competitors.
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I'm with you here. I'll be bullish on federation when I understand what non-ideological problems it solves. I totally share the ideology! (And I get the sense that you do too.) But that's not enough. It needs to be useful to be durable.
Claiming that federation is ideological is itself a very ideological statement. Being able to have an independent platform instead of a corporate-controlled one is very useful in practice.
No, it isn't.
Federation is ideological because it is not (yet?) in and of itself a useful feature. It is a feature desired by people (like myself) who have an ideology that attracts them to the idea.
Ask yourself: What is the selling point of federation / decentralization to someone who does have any ideology whatsoever with respect to technology? I want there to be a good answer to this question, but I've yet to see a compelling one.
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Copyright law is a plague on contemporary free society. I'm a composer, I work on contemporary Western classical music, and finding written music published since 1923 is a full-time job in itself. It's relatively easy (still not easy) to find extremely famous composers (e.g. Philip Glass, Gyorg Ligeti, Jennifer Higdon etc), but if you're trying to find someone lesser known, or god forbid someone unknown published by…
> god forbid someone unknown published by some random European music publishing house One of the most striking developments in the last 20 years is that so many of those European publishers are making a lot of their study scores free to read online. Apparently they have given up trying to make money from ordinary music lovers and are OK with selling just to performers and libraries. Back when I became a huge fan of a…
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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.
But I also think briandear is fundamentally right that for this to be successful and thus useful to me for more than a short period of time, it needs to have a selling point that doesn't only appeal to computer nerds like me who know what "decentralization" even is, and care about it.