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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

#31

Post by izzydata »

briandear wrote: post #21
bluefishinit wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One benefit to federation in book-focused social media is it helps stop Amazon from buying the centralized services. They bought Goodreads and Shelfari. It's great to know they won't be buying the book-iverse.

What’s wrong with Amazon? They made it possible for self published writers to actually make a living. They disrupted the big five publishers and have done a lot for independent writers. Even the indy bookstores require an author to go through corporate publishing gatekeepers. Amazon gives literally any writer an opportunity to sell books.

Amazon is too big. It attracts too many bots and fake reviews. They also have no incentive to remove fake positive removes as it is a conflict of interest for them to sell as many books as possible.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#32

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

risfriend wrote: post #4

This exists in some form here already - https://www.reddit.com/r/books/

Reddit and Twitter will be around for a while due to inertia, but it doesn't make sense to be making any new investments there. People have one foot out the door.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#33

Post by izzydata »

briandear wrote: post #16

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…

Does it matter what most people care about? I don't believe the goal is to get all the traffic from everyone wanting such a service. I think the people who do care about having a site that isn't driven by ads and corporate interest would not want a billion people using the service. So it is self selecting for like minded individuals which keeps it niche. This also keeps it less likely to be flooded by fake reviews because it isn't worth doing to a smaller audience.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#34

Post by sanderjd »

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).

It's incredibly clear at this point - and it was clear a priori also, but with some uncertainty - that this is how federated networks will work, if they do at all. This just needs to be incorporated into any assumptions about these systems. Instead of thinking through the costs and benefits of decentralization with fairly evenly distributed node sizes, it's necessary to think through the costs and benefits of a decentralized system with a power law distribution of node size, because that's going to be reality.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#35

Post by briandear »

bluefishinit wrote: post #20
briandear wrote: post #16

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 proved it could work. But I don’t understand the market problem this one is solving. 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.

I get it. But how big of a demand is there for that? Does the average Wednesday night neighborhood book club care? I am not denying that there is value there for someone, but most people don’t care. People that read books at a level of enthusiasm to join a network about reading don’t think about that stuff. Federation is a feature but it really isn’t an above the fold concern for the vast majority of the potential audience.

My point is that the value prop of this site isn’t federation, it “a social network for books.”

This could be marketed as a tool for virtual book clubs and communities. “Your book club, anywhere” kind of thing. This could be marketed as a tool for real world book clubs to use. There are thousands of book clubs who would probably love an easy to use tool for managing those clubs. Focusing on that aspect would be huge in my opinion. If the more tech astute want to “run their own instance,” that feature exists. Sort of like Wordpress for books — you have the Wordpress.com for those that just want to use the platform and the .org version for those that want to self-host as an example.

The ideological aspects are secondary assuming the goal is to grow and have a lot of people caring about this. A huge independent book community would be amazing. But this won’t get huge if normal people don’t have a reason to care.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#36

Post by freilanzer »

raybb wrote: post #22
shaniber wrote: post #17

There’s also Storygraph, a smaller, independent GoodReads alternative. It’s gotten some positive coverage, and I’ve had a good experience using it. https://www.thestorygraph.com/

The one thing they're missing for me is private notes. It's super important to me to have notes of where I heard about a book that's on my to read list. Oh and also it would be great if they upstreamed their corrections to open library. But for now I'll stick to volunteering for Open Library and improving the situation there which helps many sites. Current project I'm working on for them is to have their author pages…

You could always message them and tell them why these features would be great to have. Private notes sound useful.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#37

Post by jeroenhd »

morisy wrote: post #8
gregmfoster wrote: post #2

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.

It’s got a very ideologically-driven focus, including an anti-capital source license: https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm/blob/main/LICENS... I think the focus on federation is to encourage small, decentralized and communally operated sites that play well with the broader fediverse. I can see that working well for a lot of book communities! Also, spent a bit of time a few weeks ago and it already seemed to ha…

Well, that's a license I've never seen before! This makes it entirely unpractical for any company to host a server, which is an... interesting approach.

I'm not sure why the police or military wouldn't be allowed to host a book reading website, though. I guess this was written as some kind of anti-government protest.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#38

Post by qwerty456127 »

"Track your reading and what your friends are reading" sounds like classic social network bullshit dopamine trap. Like brag about acheivements in how many have you read through this month or be sad about how stupid/lazy you are while others are so smart and gritty. They should better offer sharing quotes/highlights/remarks/explanations/summaries/follow-ups and discussing these.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#39

Post by malermeister »

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).

I don't think it negates the decentralization.

It still allows you to pack your shit and move somewhere else should a narcissistic billionaire buy the flagship instance.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#40

Post by Angostura »

briandear wrote: post #16

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…

> She would never think about joining Bookwyrm because the value prop makes no sense to her. Why does anyone care about federated?

Why she even need to worry or know about it being federated? She would just a list of book clubs and choose one (in my case I chose an instance based in the UK because ... I'm in the UK.)

All 'Federated' means is - "if no one is talking about a particular book in your local book club, you can also opt to take part in conversations going in other book clubs."

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