It seems that this federated service falls into the same asymmetry that others have—everyone is joining the flagship instance (which negates the decentralization).
Tangential - totally enjoyed this talk <a href="https://youtu.be/Ic_5gRVTQ_k" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/Ic_5gRVTQ_k</a> by one of the creators of Bookwyrm.
Ok, hard truth time:<p>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 waiting in line for a Southwest Airlines flight to Orlando.)<p>“Federated, anti-corporate” — the creator of this site might think that’s important, but most people don’t care.<p>What does “anti-corporate” even mean? That is going to turn a lot of users off because it feels political. It’s also unnecessary as a sales tool because what would “pro-corporate” mean in the context of a book social network? A lot of the books people want to read are published by corporations. Most of the self published stuff goes through Amazon. So “anti-corporate” is what? An aspiration? Or just a tagline? Unless this is a social network for samizdat (which would actually be pretty awesome..)<p>Let me put this another way:
A book readers’ social network is an awesome idea. Goodreads proved it could work. But I don’t understand the market problem this one is solving.<p>If it were me, I would probably create a network out of a specific book genre or niche, then develop from there. But “Goodreads for Anarchists” doesn’t really light any fires for me.<p>Still, good luck to the creators. Great to see people trying to build things!
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.
There’s also Storygraph, a smaller, independent GoodReads alternative. It’s gotten some positive coverage, and I’ve had a good experience using it.<p><a href="https://www.thestorygraph.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.thestorygraph.com/</a>
Super into a book-focused social network! I was on Goodreads last night and it’s a pretty hollow shell. Such a great idea to have a place to talk about/recommend books!
For me, this is too much effort.<p>Instead I have a page on my site that tracks my books read.<p><a href="https://www.benovermyer.com/kb/books/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.benovermyer.com/kb/books/</a>
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. Maybe a federated good reads will be better as it filters out a lot more people and might get rid of a low brow stuff.
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 never empty.<p>It seems as if every new service is trying to incorporate algorithmic recommendations, social elements, and other useless frills. Let's get back to the basics. Give me a rock solid digital library.
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.
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.<p>It also rules out Gitlab.<p>I suspect they can not use any commercial host such as AWS or OVH either.<p>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.
Really neat to see federation move into a vertical like books. It seems really well suited to books (and music) since you could have instances that focus on particular genres or time periods. I also like the suggestion in their repo that book clubs run their own instances. Very cool.
Seems that one could logically integrate calibre libraries. One could I imagine have a function that rather than explicitly requiring the reviewer to provide the ebook link instead allows the user to click on a "read" button and have it examine the sources that reader knows about including but not limited to ebook sites and calibre libraries.<p>In particular its nice that calibre actually allows one to read books in the library in a web interface.<p>Bookwyrm instances running in areas that aren't liable to be taken down could provide inline libraries that readers can add to. It's sad that this is in most developed countries considered criminal instead of helpful.
Without the trailing slash defaults me to the Chinese-language page, /zh. The English page is <a href="https://joinbookwyrm.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://joinbookwyrm.com/</a>
I remember when this first emerged under the original name (which I don't remember). It was rough, but you could see the potential. I'm glad to see the developer kept at it and that it's making inroads.
Other than being distributed which is interesting, how does this differ from <a href="https://www.librarything.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.librarything.com/</a> ?
It seems the main purpose of "social networks" for books would be to talk about a book you just read. To have a forum for every book in the world. Of course most books are old and few people are reading them, so you would want the network with the largest market penetration among book readers, otherwise people will rarely find anyone to talk to for most books.
What about a federated social network for sharing books, perhaps outside of our present legal framework?<p>Yeah, I know. I just look at the absolute technological absurdity that is "e-book lending" and can't help but think that something done like this, by book lovers, could perhaps <i>emerge</i> a better way to pay writers.
Is 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.
"Track your reading and what your friends are reading" sounds like classic social network bullshit dopamine trap. Like brag about acheivements in how many have you read through this month or be sad about how stupid/lazy you are while others are so smart and gritty. They should better offer sharing quotes/highlights/remarks/explanations/summaries/follow-ups and discussing these.
This exists in some form here already - <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/books/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.reddit.com/r/books/</a>