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Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

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Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#141

Post by michaelmrose »

huggingmouth wrote: post #123
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you give an example of a thread on /lit that is of notably higher quality than what can be found on reddit and call out specific comments that wouldn't have been made without benefit of anonymity?

I was put off by the gross fire hose of drek on other boards on 4chan when I looked at it initially but note lit seems to have actually reasonable discussions. That said it doesn't look to my eyes notably different from say reddit save for the intermittent random gross like slurs tossed about which add nothing whatsoever. If folks were banned for calling each other slurs one would hope the same people who had something to say could just say it without including the slurs.

Do you have a counter argument?

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#142

Post by sanderjd »

bluefishinit wrote: post #86
sanderjd wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It will need a community to survive, so I think people being excited about it is a great first step. I feel comfortable investing into building a community knowing it won't be purchased and killed. That doesn't mean success is guaranteed, but it is a prerequisite for me to invest in a social network at this point. I'll add that a vertical like books probably has a better chance of succeeding than a more general purpo…

But if it will need a community to survive, then the selling point can't be "it won't go away after you use it for awhile". Or if it is, it needs some compelling narrative for why it will definitely attract a durable community.

FWIW: I think this product looks really great and already does a bunch of stuff I want, and looks waaaay better and runs waaaay faster than Goodreads, and those are all absolutely big selling points that I think could break through with the general book-loving community, and I think that's awesome! But I just don't think "it is decentralized" or "it will definitely not die" are clear selling points for it.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#143

Post by beowulfey »

huggingmouth wrote: post #123
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it’s just a matter of taste, honestly.

I don’t enjoy 4chan (I mostly browsed /mu/ when I visited) probably for the same reasons that you do. And that’s perfectly fine!

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#144

Post by sanderjd »

the_third_wave wrote: post #114
sanderjd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Federation is what keeps SMTP in place as the default electronic communications channel. Alternatives come and go but SMTP abides, there to cover your posterior when that fancy instant shout channel app flips over and goes the way of the dodo. While many of the current proponents of federation are wont to explain the concept in line with their own ideologies - usually in the form of references to anti-Capitalism, Ana…

I don't think people fall back to SMTP when a chat product goes away, I think they find a new centralized proprietary chat product.

SMTP survives in its federated form because of path dependency. And people didn't start using email because it was federated, they started using it because it was an entirely new capability to most people. The federation was how its creators managed to implement such a thing at that period of time, but nobody in the 90s was saying "email is great because it is decentralized!", they were saying "email is great because I don't have to wait days for a piece of paper to travel across the continent and it's cheaper and faster to type than to make a phone call!".

Another commenter put this well: decentralization / federation of social networks thus far seems to be a feature but not a benefit. What is the benefit to users, what can they do with a decentralized network that they couldn't otherwise do? So far, the answers to this are ideological, the benefit is "I don't want to use an application centrally run by XYZ corporation, and this lets me achieve that goal". I think that's incredibly reasonable, but it is downstream of ideology rather than utility.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#145

Post by michaelmrose »

Seems that one could logically integrate calibre libraries. One could I imagine have a function that rather than explicitly requiring the reviewer to provide the ebook link instead allows the user to click on a "read" button and have it examine the sources that reader knows about including but not limited to ebook sites and calibre libraries.

In particular its nice that calibre actually allows one to read books in the library in a web interface.

Bookwyrm instances running in areas that aren't liable to be taken down could provide inline libraries that readers can add to. It's sad that this is in most developed countries considered criminal instead of helpful.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#146

Post by sanderjd »

the_third_wave wrote: post #89
sanderjd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As users, federation protects us from [the service being killed or development frozen]. Honest question: Does it? Personally, I worry significantly more about bit rot on projects that make no money. Does federation solve that somehow? What I'm usually looking for is: What is the incentive for people to keep working on this? Is it a passion project made by one or more young people? What happens to it when life happe…

Federation can help if you run the software yourself since your identity and your "content" are tied to your instance just like they are with email. As long as you keep it running and make sure the software is up to date with current federation standards you're more or less safe from all those hazards. If the developers of Bookwyrm grow out of their anti-capitalist phase and sell it to Amazon, get that family and rea…

This makes some sense, but couldn't this also be achieved with a centralized but open source product?

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#147

Post by bluefishinit »

sanderjd wrote: post #142
bluefishinit wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will need a community to survive, so I think people being excited about it is a great first step. I feel comfortable investing into building a community knowing it won't be purchased and killed. That doesn't mean success is guaranteed, but it is a prerequisite for me to invest in a social network at this point. I'll add that a vertical like books probably has a better chance of succeeding than a more general purpo…

But if it will need a community to survive, then the selling point can't be "it won't go away after you use it for awhile". Or if it is, it needs some compelling narrative for why it will definitely attract a durable community. FWIW: I think this product looks really great and already does a bunch of stuff I want, and looks waaaay better and runs waaaay faster than Goodreads, and those are all absolutely big selling…

If it needs a community to survive, you first need to bootstrap that community. People who care about federation and are willing try federated projects seem like a great community to help things get started. Especially because like I said earlier, this is in a vertical where value isn't locked into social silos. Reviews that these users make won't only be read by early users who they know, but will provide value to all future users.

It's normal and actually required to start with early adopters and innovators before reaching more mainstream audiences.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#148

Post by ernesth »

https443 wrote: post #5

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 fetches data from the public APIs of openlibrary.org and inventaire.io. From my point of view, inventaire is really great as it synchronizes with wikidata and is far better at not duplicating works or authors.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#150

Post by FalconSensei »

pknerd wrote: post #133
malwrar wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

tbh, this is not my issue. My only complain with Goodreads is their pathetic UI. My own purpose of using Goodreads is tracking and the UI is so confusing that it takes me a while to figure out how to find the last page I had read and then update it.

on the other hand, I find GoodReads super intuitive. Moved to storygraph and I find the UX there kinda bad. Hard to find stuff
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