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BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

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Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#71

Post by fragileone »

hirako2000 wrote: post #35
rektide wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The federation is designed in a way that silos communities. You seem to have taken the exact opposite view of what anyone in the fediverse would consider this as. This is many connected communities. Not siloed. That's what "decentralized" means, their very first major point on the website. If there's real gaps in how federation works to connect, the fediverse is happy to discuss, adapt, & adopt: bring on your more…

Sorry I wasn't clear with what I meant stating silos. And I'm all for decentralisation, and value the open effort of Bookwyrm. Silo: the federation aspect, from what I understand of the currently hosted communities using this tech is making the exploration of books contained within each federated host. Maybe I am wrong in which case I will retract my critic. Peertube suffers the same problem. So a constructive commen…

With PeerTube there's Sepia Search [1] which allows searching for videos across all instances. All federated networks basically need open-source, centralised search engines like Sepia Search to enable users to search across all federated instances.

[1] http://sepiasearch.org/

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#72

Post by ZeroGravitas »

I think the key is to seperate the catalogue of books and authors from the social and recommendation elements, which is another aspect of federation and de-centralization.

If you're aiming to lock people in and own all their data, then you need to combine the two, but then you kill the social elements by sucking in lots of disparate communities. You can do something sub-reddit like, but if you're not actually interested in sucking up everyone's information then you can slice off the catalogue part to openlibrary and wikidata and have a much easier time building your specific social thing on top.

Bookwyrm (and inventaire.io) seem to have adopted this approach, building on OpenLibrary and Wikidata catalogues.

And in the background those two data projects interact at various levels and with other open data projects that build from the same sources. For example, there's wikidata projects that try to seperate out all the acadamic authors with the same name, so you can have multiple John Smith's and find the right one and connect them across different databases.

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#73

Post by ZeroGravitas »

Scarblac wrote: post #30
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…

Where do you get the books from? I'm often surprised when I start reading an obscure Dutch second hand book that Goodreads has it. Is the ISBN database open data?

Goodreads is owned by Amazon, and a lot of the data in various digital sources (both real and correct and random or mistaken) seem to come from people listing physical books for sale through Amazon. (Library catalogues are another common source)

The ISBN codes seems to be in some weird legal gray area.

The codes can be broken down so you can tell (to some degree) which language, geographic region and publisher was involved and whether the ISBN is valid (as in meets a checksum constraint) and has been "issued" (a continually updating list) managed in a decentralised manner but since it's an older system, it wasn't ever really designed for this kind of usage.

It also hits the problem, that these days you care a little less about the actual physical object, which ISBN was designed around, but certainly a trove of data hidden there.

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#74

Post by commoner »

Krasnol wrote: post #48
matthberg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That info is out of date, bookwyrm.social is in open registration now. A more accurate list of instances is available here: https://joinbookwyrm.com/instances/ . I signed up on bookwyrm.social (here: https://bookwyrm.social ), though it took a notably long time to receive the email confirmation message.

The whole instance is quite slow now. Email took something around 20min for me.

Probably the HN effect. Give it a day and I'd expect the site to speed up as the traffic falls.

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#75

Post by corobo »

zozbot234 wrote: post #56
corobo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any instance that did this wouldn't care, they have all the users

See also Google talk, Facebook messages, literally any other thing that was once open access ever by a big company. That racist Twitter gab is an isolated Mastodon install last I heard if you want to see this in action, though I wouldn't recommend going there

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#76

Post by the_biot »

verylittlemeat wrote: post #69
input_sh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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…

Goodreads will always win simply because it's where all the users are. Like reddit or any huge site its usefulness isn't in the presented top layer (recommendations/front page/popular list of x) it's the depth of millions of users. If you read a relatively obscure book and look it up on goodreads then you read through the reviews to find users who gave a high quality write up and then look at that user's profile. Thi…

In other words, stop trying, let's just stick with the current terrible status quo. That's a supremely unhelpful comment to make, intended to discourage anyone from improving things ever. Shall we all just go back to a cave and knock some rocks together?

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#77

Post by Krasnol »

commoner wrote: post #74
Krasnol wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole instance is quite slow now. Email took something around 20min for me.

Probably the HN effect. Give it a day and I'd expect the site to speed up as the traffic falls.

Yes, I'm pretty sure that's it but it was still working.

Just a bit slow.

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#78

Post by [deleted] »

gverrilla wrote: post #60
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 pe…

[deleted]

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#79

Post by bogwog »

leetrout wrote: post #66
personjerry wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GoodReads isn't about learning though. It's about books. I think there's value and potential in the niche you've chosen. I want to point out that the "learning" niche is very different than the "book review" niche and comes with its own set of very strong competitors.

This is all new to me. Who competes in this space? Or what are some good keywords to search with?

Learning? Just search for "learn " and you'll see a bunch. I remember my university had a partnership with one called Lynda.com, but that seems to have been acquired by LinkedIn.

Re: BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement

#80

Post by zdunn »

nsim wrote: post #25
rektide wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

federated means your bookgroup could set up their own instance & everyone could either post their book reviewws there, or you could aggregate your own reviews into that instance. it's the freedom to start new communities, while still being able to participate worldwide. it means that there's a protocol there, at the heart, for having multiple parties cooperating. it means anyone is free to build their own server or c…

I'm still trying to understand how this works at a functional level. I see you can find reviews via ActivePub services, like Mastodon, but you can only post from BookWyrm instances? i.e., you can't have one federated social identity that can post reviews and post other fediverse content?

No. Unfortunately, the fediverse has kind of given up on the idea of a single identity using a variety of services. Every new ActivityPub services wants to own the user account and the interactions are one way or extremely limited (likes/reposts).
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