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BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

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Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#51

Post by toyg »

dictatorsunion wrote: post #18

As an avid Goodreads user, Id say 80-90% of active GR users are female teenagers. Id suggest promoting on booktwitter or booktok instead if you want more traction. There’s also StoryGraph in the running with the same if not more features and a pretty strong network effect already, but still miles away from GR. GR is the laggiest platform I have ever used, and the tech updates are minimal at best, but people still use…

> As an avid Goodreads user, Id say 80-90% of active GR users are female teenagers.

Lol, I would have said "50yo vanity-obsessed male geeks" instead, judging by the activity in my feed.

I recently made a bit of an effort to use GR a bit more, to go through some of the challenges and increase my reading rates. The anglocentrism is tiring, though - all the "best" lists are dominated by mediocre Anglo writers. If I remember correctly, when "social lit" sites first exploded, they had basically segmented by language - I know Italians used Anubii rather than GR, for example. I picked GR because I was still somewhat in love with the anglosphere, I think I'm ready to move to something a bit more "i18n", but it's not clear what that might be.

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#52

Post by varjag »

oehtXRwMkIs wrote: post #28
mdoms wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this federated stuff will ever gain mainstream acceptance. I would bet my house on it. It adds multiple layers of complexity and a ton of UX trade-off, and doesn't solve any problems for a typical user.

Ever heard of email?

That's a stretch, as it has neither identity nor content federation. Would you call IP stack a federation protocol too?

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#53

Post by avnigo »

mathnmusic wrote: post #26

GoodReads is all but dead for many. A few months ago, they deprecated their API keys (without notice). I started building a GoodReads-equivalent but realized that many people care more about learning from multiple media formats (blogs, videos, research papers, interactive explorables, podcasts, courses etc) rather than simply reading books. Because there are too many projects attempting to build a new GoodReads, I en…

I recently came across the API issue too; from their page on APIs [0]

> Goodreads no longer issues new developer keys for our public developer API and plans to retire the current version of these tools.

I generally find that I trust their book ratings more than any other sites, though, seeing as they are user-generated, and also given the amount of users being in the 10s of millions.

BookWyrm seems pretty fantastic and promising from what I see, but I don't know that it would attract the current Goodreads user. I'm really hoping it gets some traction.

[0]: https://help.goodreads.com/s/article/Does-Goodreads-support-...

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#54

Post by denisw »

jan_Inkepa wrote: post #41
tpoacher wrote: post #38

What exactly is wrong with Goodreads? I keep hearing a lot of hate about it, but the reasons seem never expanded on. I use Goodreads to maintain a public bookshelf of books I have read or want to read. It's also nice that I can check what my friends are reading. Occasionally it's nice to read other people's views on a book. I typically tend not to agree, but it's nice that these exist. That's it. Isn't that what Good…

It does feel a bit neglected/dead (except for the fact that people still use it a bunch) - the changes come rarely. In some sense this is nice! It's a stable piece of software that does what it should do. One thing I find lacking is that it seems to mostly be used by english-speakers. So the one case where I'd be curious to use the social networking features, for non-English-lanuage literature, it falls flat. There's…

In the German-speaking world, LovelyBooks [1] is quite popular. It seems to be strongly focused on fiction, though.

[1]: https://www.lovelybooks.de/

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#55

Post by [deleted] »

corobo wrote: post #34
mdoms wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this federated stuff will ever gain mainstream acceptance. I would bet my house on it. It adds multiple layers of complexity and a ton of UX trade-off, and doesn't solve any problems for a typical user.

I agree in terms of users running their own thing. What I do imagine will happen is that one instance takes off, gets itself a board or VC to answer to, removes activitypub, runs away with the win Tech people will be mad but overall nobody will be able to do anything about it as they'll just ground-up rewrite eventually. The users won't care about the drama at all Money is a bastard I'd love to be wrong on it and I'm…

[deleted]

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#56

Post by zozbot234 »

corobo wrote: post #34
mdoms wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this federated stuff will ever gain mainstream acceptance. I would bet my house on it. It adds multiple layers of complexity and a ton of UX trade-off, and doesn't solve any problems for a typical user.

I agree in terms of users running their own thing. What I do imagine will happen is that one instance takes off, gets itself a board or VC to answer to, removes activitypub, runs away with the win Tech people will be mad but overall nobody will be able to do anything about it as they'll just ground-up rewrite eventually. The users won't care about the drama at all Money is a bastard I'd love to be wrong on it and I'm…

> What I do imagine will happen is that one instance takes off, gets itself a board or VC to answer to, removes activitypub, runs away with the win

Any instance which did this would be totally forgoing the network effect of being able to link up w/ other instances. So this is quite unlikely, at least in most cases.

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#58

Post by ainzzorl »

input_sh wrote: post #44
tpoacher wrote: post #38

What exactly is wrong with Goodreads? I keep hearing a lot of hate about it, but the reasons seem never expanded on. I use Goodreads to maintain a public bookshelf of books I have read or want to read. It's also nice that I can check what my friends are reading. Occasionally it's nice to read other people's views on a book. I typically tend not to agree, but it's nice that these exist. That's it. Isn't that what Good…

- It sucks at recommending books. You may stumble upon some book in the home feed, but its recommendation is as good as if it didn't exist. - Lists suck. For example, it never anticipates even something as simple as abandoning a book (though you can create that). - There's like a whole industry of faking ratings and nobody cares about it enough to do anything about it. - It's owned by Amazon, but Amazon basically did…

> Amazon basically didn't touch it since the acquisition almost a decade ago.

This is what I love about it. When something works for me (and Goodreads does), I don't want it to change.

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#60

Post by gverrilla »

personjerry wrote: post #10

It really feels like "federated" is to tech geeks (i.e. HN people) what "blockchain" is to a lot of non-tech people. What does federated do for me at all in solving this problem?

I may be wrong, but all I have seen "federated" resembles one of the worst and most harmful websites ever created (twitter), which is really disappointing and disgusting. Likewise, the "blockchain" scene talks about innovation all day but the bulk of their creation is boring and dated, recreating the banking/finance scene using new tech with minor changes. Back in the day, people thought machine guns would produce peace!
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