Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine if you read a book and just enjoyed it! Is there an app for that?
Are you kidding or do you really feel like you need an app for such an occasion?
I'm 99% sure they're kidding.
Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
81–90 of 198 posts
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#82Is there a book review site that actually has credible reviews of comedy books? I realized recently that it’s night impossible to find a useful comedy category.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#83Ok, 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…
> What does “anti-corporate” even mean? That is going to turn a lot of users off because it feels political. Those people can use any anodyne corporate option they 'choose' (read: Amazon). No one is stopping them. Tbh, if someone thinks that corporations are cool and friendly, to the point where they're scared of using a non-corporate book club, then I wouldn't miss them. Their absence would actually be a big value p…
Lots of FOSS stuff exists because of small capitalist corporations helping support, build features, host and so on.
The project itself is hosted on Microsoft Github! Hm, I wonder if Bookwyrm is technically breaking their own license by hosting with Microsoft.. since git "copies" code.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#84Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I could but it cost $5/mo to write in their feature request form. I don't think it's a bad idea but I won't be paying to request a feature.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But how big of a demand is there for that? I think every Goodreads or Shelfari user would benefit from the service not being dead.
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 purpose social network, because there's always going to be value in providing metadata around books, it's timeless information more like wikipedia than twitter. I see a lot of value in creating a community driven and community owned corpus of book information and reviews.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#87It seems that this federated service falls into the same asymmetry that others have—everyone is joining the flagship instance (which negates the decentralization).
They need a brain-dead way to hop between instances without losing data, if it doesn't already exist. Of course this only works well if the instance that is shutting down gives notice in time for people who login in only occasionally to see it.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 au…
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.
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.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> 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 realise there is more to life than chasing characters on a screen, get hit by the proverbial Bus or otherwise lose interest in maintaining the project you still have your "content" and identity which you can keep alive by either federating with other ActivityPub-enabled platforms - which will probably lead to a loss of functionality - or maintaining/getting someone to maintain the project for as long as there are interested users. All this stands and falls with the viability of ActivityPub, it will be interesting to see whether the concept pans out in the coming years.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#90I can't be the only one with a burgeoning appetite for an experience that is solely focused on the individual. I don't care about being social in this domain and that opinion often feels like a contrarian one. I want to track my books, my thoughts on those books, and my upcoming queue. There's a handful of services that provide a wonderful curation of books to read (mostly human-curated) and as such, my queue is neve…
This is a fediverse app. there are no algorithmic recommendations.
> There's a handful of services that provide a wonderful curation of books to read (mostly human-curated) and as such, my queue is never empty.
I feel like you didn't even _look_ at what you were commenting on. This is LITERALLY that.
Think Goodreads but without the BS influence from its Amazon overlords trying to sell you something or people mass-dunking on a book that hasn't come out because they disagree with the author's politics or the fact that it has a gay protagonist or whatever it is they're up in arms about today.
> Give me a rock solid digital library.
Sure, but wanting that doesn't mean there isn't also value in this. DOUBLY so when you yourself said that you valued services that do exactly what this does.