Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

joinbookwyrm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–198 of 198 posts

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#191

Post by sanderjd »

the_third_wave wrote: post #182
sanderjd wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, that would make it possible to create alternative instances to use if and when the main instance goes belly-up. Those alternative instances would start afresh, without the user base and lacking any content created by them. If there were more than one alternative instance the two would not communicate unless they employed some sort of federation - ActivityPub or something similar - or some mirroring scheme.

Got it! This is an important distinction - open data not just open source. (But throwing back to another recent thread - I think this is at odds with privacy - data can't be both private and persistent beyond the existence of a single server.)

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#192

Post by mekarpeles »

rg111 wrote: post #190
mekarpeles wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's awesome. May I ask, for pre-ISBN books, do you typically look up books by title? What do you do with books when you find them? What is your primary use case / reason? Is it as a reference library (of things to read)? Keeping track of reading?

Yes, by title. And I often find out about them from friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. I also find out about a great deal of books from other books, either mentioned or cited/referred to. I read some books cover to cover, and some are kept as references. Books are mainly on Math, Philosophy, and History. There are other topics, too. I read in 4 languages and GR is very Anglo-centric. That's another issue. I want…

very helpful, thank you. Good to learn international use case is working okay for you (I know we can improve). If you're not on our slack already, feel free to email me @ -- you're welcome to ask questions and weigh so we can continue to try to move in the right direction for you and others.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#193

Post by lukas099 »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #159
lukas099 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use /lit/. It definitely does have Nazism and patriarchy plastered over it. If you dig around, there are great posts there. But it is a valid complaint. I'm wondering, do you take more issue with the Redditors saying they don't like the far-right stuff on /lit/ than you do with the actual far-right stuff on /lit/? Or are you commenting on the political nature of the entire (/lit/ + Reddit) system?

> I'm wondering, do you take more issue with the Redditors I joined a subreddit a few years ago, printSF, I think (not sure) thinking that it might be more to my liking. The regular science fiction subreddit seemed to be more about Marvel movies (it's not just reddit that does this, scifi.stackexchange might as well be harrypotter.stackexchange). I tried to like it. I saw books and authors that were unfamiliar (that…

So I guess the differentiator for you is that the 4channers are trying to be edgy, meaning they do not take their extremist positions seriously, whereas the redditors are more serious about their political statements?

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#194

Post by the_third_wave »

sanderjd wrote: post #185
the_third_wave wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. ...after they told their "friends" (i.e. other users of the failed app) via email about that hot new app that is totally going to be the place to be. That is what I mean with "SMTP abides", it is there and will be there while the centralised proprietary churn comes and goes. SMTP is ea…

> ...after they told their "friends" (i.e. other users of the failed app) via email about that hot new app that is totally going to be the place to be. There may have been a time when people spread the "hot new app" via email, but it ended decades ago at the latest, when Facebook came out. But I dunno, even before that, I heard about this kind of thing on AIM or one of the many other ones that already existed at that…

> But that's all beside the point being made here. The point is that federation is not why email was successful, or why it persists. It was just an implementation detail of a capability that was fundamentally novel to most people when they first came across it.

Nope, hard disagree there. If the mail-related protocols had not been federated - i.e. had email relied on a single-source centralised server - it would not even have survived into the 90's. It would have come up against a host of commercial competitors and eventually would have succumbed to some "Microsoft Network"-like thing which would have come pre-installed on Windows 95. Only Greybeards would use email, the latte sipping set would use Apple Mail, most of the rest would use whatever Microsoft presented them with. That was the original intent of the Microsoft Network as described in the first (hardcover) edition of Gates' book "The Road Ahead" [1] in which he envisaged a future where the internet gave way to the "Information Superhighway" based around proprietary technologies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%2...

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#195

Post by Semaphor »

mekarpeles wrote: post #180
Semaphor wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What it sadly is missing is the data. My first try, I found 2 out of 3 books in a series missing, and the first book was missing data. It looks like ImportBot [0] adds them somehow, but it’s not clear how this is done and how it could be fixed as there’s no information on the user page. As much as I’d like an open solution, if I have to add every other book I read to the database first, that will make me stop using i…

Hi, can I ask what books were missing? The more examples we have, the more we can update our bots to make sure these books get either imported or fixed within our search engine. I completely understand wanting to use a service that has the books you're looking for and would also completely understand if it's too much work to type up the examples. If you'd rather not do so publicly, happy to receive your email at and…

Hey, sure: The Series is by Glynn Stewart, Scattered Stars: Evasion, Book 1 Evasion [0]

Here it already only has the printed version, not the main kindle version (his books are KDP, so sadly Amazon-exclusive). It’s also lacking the Series title (Scattered Stars: Evasion), only having the book title "Evasion".

Missing from the series are Discretion (Scattered Stars: Evasion Book 2) [1] and the new Absolution (Scattered Stars: Evasion Book 3) [2].

Looking through his other works, they all seem to only have the print version.

I’m also not sure if the ImportBot [3] is official, or just one huge contributor, but it could really do with some kind of information, including how something like this could be fixed, or if it can.

[0]: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL26413643W/Evasion

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B57FV55Q

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C6YV8JDK

[3]: https://openlibrary.org/people/ImportBot

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#196

Post by merdaverse »

teeray wrote: post #3

It seems that this federated service falls into the same asymmetry that others have—everyone is joining the flagship instance (which negates the decentralization).

Federation has many flaws, but this is not one of them. It makes sense when the service is new to focus mostly on one big instance instead of many instances with 10 people each. Case in point:

- The Mastodon flagship instance has 25% monthly active users of the total network https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon

- Lemmy flaghsip* (which is newer than Mastodon) has 38% https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

As time goes by people will distribute over the other instance. And even now it's not so bad as you make it seem.

* Not even the actual flagship maintained by the developers, but one created by the community

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#197

Post by merdaverse »

smcleod wrote: post #68
ecshafer wrote: post #59

Goodreads 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…

And it’s owned by Amazon, who have no incentive to make it any better than it is.

I mean, they kind of do, they own Kindle, so you would think it would be in their interest make it non shit to promote the books on their stores

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#198

Post by mavhc »

sanderjd wrote: post #138
goodpoint wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Claiming that federation is ideological is itself a very ideological statement. 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…

When the site you use goes bad/offline/whatever, you can easily move to another. If you're moving from a site that went bad/offline/whatever, do you want to lose all your data again next time?
Post reply on HN