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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

#91

Post by LightHugger »

bavarianbob wrote: post #76

I 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…

That kind of information should not be hosted on a website though, because if the website goes down you'd be losing all that tracking data, all those thoughts and all those plans. Maybe if there's a way to export everything in one click and you take regular backups. But a service like that is the worst place to store data that you'd rather not lose.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#92

Post by vorpalhex »

Oddly enough, their license which prohibits any sort of standard corporation setup from hosting or making copies of the software, would seem to prohibit their own source code being on their own Github.

It also rules out Gitlab.

I suspect they can not use any commercial host such as AWS or OVH either.

As a self hoster, I don't think even I would be able to host this - I use cloudflare and would be sending source code materials to be copied by cloudflare.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#93

Post by masukomi »

https443 wrote: post #5

Where does it get the list of books from? I thought that was always the biggest challenge with sites like Goodreads etc. Goodreads both (A) pulls data from Amazon, and (B) has an army of volunteer "librarians" who have additional privileges to merge duplicate books etc.

I _think_ it's just things users have added. This is a fediverse app. It's not some centralized list of books that people are working from. It's not limited to English books, or even US books.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#94

Post by eimrine »

bavarianbob wrote: post #76

I 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…

A rock solid digital lib should be abuse-proof or it gonna be not rock-solid.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#95

Post by masukomi »

LightHugger wrote: post #91
bavarianbob wrote: post #76

I 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…

That kind of information should not be hosted on a website though, because if the website goes down you'd be losing all that tracking data, all those thoughts and all those plans. Maybe if there's a way to export everything in one click and you take regular backups. But a service like that is the worst place to store data that you'd rather not lose.

... this is an open source federated app. There is NO reason you can't run your own instance that you control and back up that participates in the network. IF you don't want to pay for expensive hosting, but want it to be always on, then throw it on a raspberry pie and run it from home.

also, because it's federated, all the data you add is backed up on all the other instances that federate with yours. It isn't easy to recreate from their copies, but it's not lost.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#96

Post by deanc »

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).

Consumers want centralisation. All of this stuff is too complicated right now for end-users.

In an ideal world, my data would live on the instance but as soon as its mutated a local copy is sync'd through the browser/app. That way it's my data, and if the instance goes down, I can choose to sync it somewhere else.

Ideally this would be packaged up in one application, so for different kinds of "sites" the mechanism for syncin'g and migrating would be the same.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#97

Post by goodpoint »

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…

> “Federated, anti-corporate” — the creator of this site might think that’s important, but most people don’t care.

Most people never learn and fall for the same tricks every time. Bait and switch, enshittification, and the chickens come home to roost.

> hard truth time

So other people are either lying or to soft to accept the truth? Please spare us.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#98

Post by flir »

saltysalt wrote: post #77

Other than being distributed which is interesting, how does this differ from https://www.librarything.com/ ?

If I had to guess (I'm probably not going to sign up), LT centres books while this seems to centre reading. So a bit less "database for books", a bit more "social media for reading"?

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#99

Post by freilanzer »

raybb wrote: post #85
freilanzer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Makes sense.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#100

Post by 9erdelta »

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…

what is /lit/?
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