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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

#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.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#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.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#6
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).

Does it? The possibility of doing otherwise seems just as important as the reality of doing it.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#7

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

That’s like saying the /r/books subreddit exists in some form already as the NYT bestsellers list. This is fundamentally different (and noteworthy), as it’s another entry in the fediverse space.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#8

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 have the nicest UX of the open social book services, at least that I could see (would love recs - mostly interested in a personal tracker).

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#9
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.

https://OpenLibrary.org is Internet Archive's initiative to solve this once and for all. Plus it lets you borrow e-books.
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