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Main thing I want to self-host for friends, that's not served by any of a hundred chat apps: A place to share media reviews and recommendations. Wiki-like is O

by bamfly 3y ago

Main thing I want to self-host for friends, that's not served by any of a hundred chat apps: A place to share media reviews and recommendations. Wiki-like is OK, as long as table support is great. Difficulty: it should be able to helpfully look up and create entries for any new media it encounters, using various online sources (IMDB, The Movie Database, TVDB, maybe the Musicbrainz DB, something else authoritative-ish for video games, books, and comic books). So if you want to add a title to a table of, say, sci-fi movies, and link that to a review of same, if it's already got the movie, it should recommend it based on the title you type in, and if not, it should find likely candidates to suggest, and fill in things like release year, director, actors, et c., from outside sources, automatically, when you select one of them. It should be able to find all mentions of a given piece of media within its system, such that one could look up a page for a given, say, album, and get a list of every page where it's mentioned on the site. It should also maintain a watched/listened/played/read list for each user, and be able to import that from places like Letterboxd. Basically, a Wiki with smart media metadata import. It's the only thing we want to do that's not served adequately by chat.

rakoo 3y ago
Chat is a very bad flow for this, because chat is a stream, not a garden. It's made for quick feedback. What you want is closer to a wiki, but I understand you need to share it with other people and discuss about it. I don't know of any software that does that, but the good thing is that maybe you don't need a new platform. Creating new platforms just splits the communities and is against the Unix philosophy we hold dear. Maybe a good first step is to be in the Fediverse, and create an actor per entry. That actor would contain all facts, potentially linking other entries. Anyone could @ movies, so you'd see the discussion about them. You can create lists, like "watched/listened/played/read" and add actors to those lists. Those actors don't post anything, they're just a "rallying point" for conversation. They're more encompassing than hashtags. Sounds like a weekend project for someone adventurous enough
- bamfly 3y ago
  Yeah, I've considered slapping something together in Django or what have you—libraries exist to make a lot of this not that hard—but... kids. And the new Zelda, for that matter :-)
  - epiccoleman 3y ago
    The new Zelda has utterly destroyed my progress on side projects and also playing guitar. That's ok though, this happens to me every now and then - a game will come out that is so good / compelling that I just need to drop everything else and jam all my free time into it. It's almost like something in my psychology is saying "play the shit out of this so that we can get over the obsession and get back to other pursuits quickly." I don't game all that much these days, so when something really good comes along, I just let myself go nuts on it. I've realized I seem to work in cycles, so after my Zelda obsession dies off, I'm sure I'll get back to other stuff.
    - abnercoimbre 3y ago
      One could argue it's important to play it if virtually all of your friends are playing it too (as is my case.) "Cultural moments" and what have you: it won't reach OOT levels, but boy is it close!
mawise 3y ago
I've thought about this in the work I've done on Haven[1]. Today Haven is just self-hosted linear posting like a blog, but private and tied together with RSS. I've got ambitions of adding media/restaurant/service recommendations where you can post your recommendations and they can be separately searched/aggregated, probably even keeping RSS as the protocol. This gives you a Yelp that can't be gamed by companies because there is no central place for a company to go to game /manage the recommendations. [1]: https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org
narag 3y ago
It's been a long time since I used it, and I've read that there was a messed version change since then. So take it with a pinch of salt. Drupal had a very nice hybrid of forum and wiki, it was called "book" IIRC. It was possible to organize the pages in a hierarchy and at the same time it provided discussion in every node. Being modular and open source, you could add the import thing. I've been working in importing stuff for a while so maybe I see it easier than it is. The community features were very good, with a nice permissions system.
NoGravitas 3y ago
Bookwyrm does exactly what you want, but only for books. It would be very nice to have something comparable for other media.

by bamfly 3y ago

rakoo 3y ago

Chat is a very bad flow for this, because chat is a stream, not a garden. It's made for quick feedback. What you want is closer to a wiki, but I understand you need to share it with other people and discuss about it. I don't know of any software that does that, but the good thing is that maybe you don't need a new platform. Creating new platforms just splits the communities and is against the Unix philosophy we hold dear. Maybe a good first step is to be in the Fediverse, and create an actor per entry. That actor would contain all facts, potentially linking other entries. Anyone could @ movies, so you'd see the discussion about them. You can create lists, like "watched/listened/played/read" and add actors to those lists. Those actors don't post anything, they're just a "rallying point" for conversation. They're more encompassing than hashtags. Sounds like a weekend project for someone adventurous enough

bamfly 3y ago
Yeah, I've considered slapping something together in Django or what have you—libraries exist to make a lot of this not that hard—but... kids. And the new Zelda, for that matter :-)
- epiccoleman 3y ago
  The new Zelda has utterly destroyed my progress on side projects and also playing guitar. That's ok though, this happens to me every now and then - a game will come out that is so good / compelling that I just need to drop everything else and jam all my free time into it. It's almost like something in my psychology is saying "play the shit out of this so that we can get over the obsession and get back to other pursuits quickly." I don't game all that much these days, so when something really good comes along, I just let myself go nuts on it. I've realized I seem to work in cycles, so after my Zelda obsession dies off, I'm sure I'll get back to other stuff.
  - abnercoimbre 3y ago
    One could argue it's important to play it if virtually all of your friends are playing it too (as is my case.) "Cultural moments" and what have you: it won't reach OOT levels, but boy is it close!

mawise 3y ago

I've thought about this in the work I've done on Haven[1]. Today Haven is just self-hosted linear posting like a blog, but private and tied together with RSS. I've got ambitions of adding media/restaurant/service recommendations where you can post your recommendations and they can be separately searched/aggregated, probably even keeping RSS as the protocol. This gives you a Yelp that can't be gamed by companies because there is no central place for a company to go to game /manage the recommendations. [1]: https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org

narag 3y ago

It's been a long time since I used it, and I've read that there was a messed version change since then. So take it with a pinch of salt. Drupal had a very nice hybrid of forum and wiki, it was called "book" IIRC. It was possible to organize the pages in a hierarchy and at the same time it provided discussion in every node. Being modular and open source, you could add the import thing. I've been working in importing stuff for a while so maybe I see it easier than it is. The community features were very good, with a nice permissions system.

NoGravitas 3y ago

Bookwyrm does exactly what you want, but only for books. It would be very nice to have something comparable for other media.