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Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
- gregmfoster 3y agoI 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.
- morisy 3y agoIt’s got a very ideologically-driven focus, including an anti-capital source license: https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm/blob/main/LICENSE.md 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).
- jeroenhd 3y agoWell, that's a license I've never seen before! This makes it entirely unpractical for any company to host a server, which is an... interesting approach. I'm not sure why the police or military wouldn't be allowed to host a book reading website, though. I guess this was written as some kind of anti-government protest.
- thebooktocome 3y ago> I'm not sure why the police or military wouldn't be allowed to host a book reading website, though. Many religions have an injunction against killing or otherwise contributing to the harm of sentient beings.
- bluefishinit 3y agoOne benefit to federation in book-focused social media is it helps stop Amazon from buying the centralized services. They bought Goodreads and Shelfari. It's great to know they won't be buying the book-iverse.
- briandear 3y agoWhat’s wrong with Amazon? They made it possible for self published writers to actually make a living. They disrupted the big five publishers and have done a lot for independent writers. Even the indy bookstores require an author to go through corporate publishing gatekeepers. Amazon gives literally any writer an opportunity to sell books.
- bluefishinit 3y agoI buy tons of books through Amazon and own a Kindle. That being said they're horrible at running book social networks. Of the two they bought they killed one and froze development on Goodreads. A federated book community will stop them from swooping in and killing the whole party.
- guerrilla 3y agoIt's a blatant conflict of interest for the book store and the book review to be the same company.
- izzydata 3y agoAmazon is too big. It attracts too many bots and fake reviews. They also have no incentive to remove fake positive removes as it is a conflict of interest for them to sell as many books as possible.
- vidarh 3y agoI use Amazon a lot, but that doesn't change the rot that set in for Goodreads after Amazon bought them.
- teeray 3y agoIt seems that this federated service falls into the same asymmetry that others have—everyone is joining the flagship instance (which negates the decentralization).
- ethbr0 3y agoDoes it? The possibility of doing otherwise seems just as important as the reality of doing it.
- guerrilla 3y agoNah, it doesn't negate anything. The flagship instance is a fine default but it's important to be able to move at any time for any reason and even to run one's own. This is itself a quality feedback mechanism and freedom.
- DaSHacka 3y agoI think this itself is the big benefit of federated services for most people. I'm less concerned with proper distribution of users across instances but rather is users always have recourse should any particular instance get elon'd.
- guerrilla 3y agoExactly... and they will. The drama always boils up and even if it doesn't, people die and such.
- criddell 3y agoIf I were going to join this, I would seek out the flagship instance. It’s the least likely to shut down a year from now. I think it’s also important to make signing up as frictionless as possible. I would guess most people don’t care if it’s a federated service or even what that means. If you ask those people to choose an instance, you are instantly going to lose some of them.
- sanderjd 3y agoIt's incredibly clear at this point - and it was clear a priori also, but with some uncertainty - that this is how federated networks will work, if they do at all. This just needs to be incorporated into any assumptions about these systems. Instead of thinking through the costs and benefits of decentralization with fairly evenly distributed node sizes, it's necessary to think through the costs and benefits of a decentralized system with a power law distribution of node size, because that's going to be reality.
- risfriend 3y agoThis exists in some form here already - https://www.reddit.com/r/books/ https://www.reddit.com/r/books/
- teeray 3y agoThat’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.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoReddit and Twitter will be around for a while due to inertia, but it doesn't make sense to be making any new investments there. People have one foot out the door.
- ranting-moth 3y agoI like the phrase "in some form" in the context of Reddit. To me, that form resembles the majestic Titanic, steaming away in the moonlight.
- https443 3y agoWhere 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.
- eshnil 3y agohttps://OpenLibrary.org https://OpenLibrary.org is Internet Archive's initiative to solve this once and for all. Plus it lets you borrow e-books.
- https443 3y agoWow, I just realized Open Library covers like 80% of Goodreads as well: read/to-read lists, ratings, yearly reading goals. Seems like https://openlibrary.org https://openlibrary.org itself would be a fine Goodreads alternative if you don't want to set up your own Bookwyrm instance.
- Semaphor 3y agoWhat it sadly is missing is the data. My first try, I found 2 out of 3 books in a series missing, and the first book was missing data. It looks like ImportBot [0] adds them somehow, but it’s not clear how this is done and how it could be fixed as there’s no information on the user page. As much as I’d like an open solution, if I have to add every other book I read to the database first, that will make me stop using it quickly. [0]: https://openlibrary.org/people/ImportBot https://openlibrary.org/people/ImportBot
- mekarpeles 3y agoHi, can I ask what books were missing? The more examples we have, the more we can update our bots to make sure these books get either imported or fixed within our search engine. I completely understand wanting to use a service that has the books you're looking for and would also completely understand if it's too much work to type up the examples. If you'd rather not do so publicly, happy to receive your email at <mek@archive.org> and do what I can to help. Thank you!
- smcin 3y agoWithout the trailing slash defaults me to the Chinese-language page, /zh. The English page is https://joinbookwyrm.com/ https://joinbookwyrm.com/
- ricardobayes 3y agoChances are, your browser or OS language is in Chinese?
- smcin 3y agoNo, it's English
- FalconSensei 3y agomine redirects to the german one. US IP and English browser and OS.
- bluefishinit 3y agoReally 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.
- qotsy 3y agoHomepage loads slow because there is a 2.6MB png image
- cubefox 3y agoWrote them an email
- ape4 3y agoIts the image of a bunch of book covers. Better to have them together in one image than separate images. https://joinbookwyrm.com/static/images/book-grid.png https://joinbookwyrm.com/static/images/book-grid.png
- TremendousJudge 3y agoIt features several photographs, it probably should've been a jpg at least.
- DaSHacka 3y agoOr a webp, much preferable for the size savings[0] if its not an image the end-user would ever want to save. [0] https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/ https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/
- briandear 3y agoOk, 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 waiting in line for a Southwest Airlines flight to Orlando.) “Federated, anti-corporate” — the creator of this site might think that’s important, but most people don’t care. 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..) 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. 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. Still, good luck to the creators. Great to see people trying to build things!
- bluefishinit 3y ago> 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.
- briandear 3y agoI 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 audience. My point is that the value prop of this site isn’t federation, it “a social network for books.” This could be marketed as a tool for virtual book clubs and communities. “Your book club, anywhere” kind of thing. This could be marketed as a tool for real world book clubs to use. There are thousands of book clubs who would probably love an easy to use tool for managing those clubs. Focusing on that aspect would be huge in my opinion. If the more tech astute want to “run their own instance,” that feature exists. Sort of like Wordpress for books — you have the Wordpress.com for those that just want to use the platform and the .org version for those that want to self-host as an example. The ideological aspects are secondary assuming the goal is to grow and have a lot of people caring about this. A huge independent book community would be amazing. But this won’t get huge if normal people don’t have a reason to care.
- shaniber 3y agoThere’s also Storygraph, a smaller, independent GoodReads alternative. It’s gotten some positive coverage, and I’ve had a good experience using it. https://www.thestorygraph.com/ https://www.thestorygraph.com/
- raybb 3y agoThe 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 supplemented by Wikidata. It's relatively low hanging fruit and then encourages people to contribute further upstream. If anyone is interested in volunteering as a dev, designer, or librarian you should totally hop on their weekly call it's very friendly :)
- freilanzer 3y agoYou could always message them and tell them why these features would be great to have. Private notes sound useful.
- zimpenfish 3y agoAlready on the request list - https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/requests-ideas/posts/private-notes-on-books-1 https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/requests-ideas/posts/priva... - but missing the "without currently reading the book" aspect that I think 'raybb is talking about.
- raybb 3y agoI 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.
- freilanzer 3y ago
- irajdeep 3y agoTangential - totally enjoyed this talk https://youtu.be/Ic_5gRVTQ_k https://youtu.be/Ic_5gRVTQ_k by one of the creators of Bookwyrm.
- grey_earthling 3y agoI enjoyed this one, from their homepage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANYMii3Sypg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANYMii3Sypg
- 4BynHmBFUxBD 3y agoReminds me of this book: https://pragprog.com/titles/jbmaze/mazes-for-programmers/ https://pragprog.com/titles/jbmaze/mazes-for-programmers/
- lasermatts 3y agoSuper 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!
- mavhc 3y agoA social network that doesn't let me use a social login? Sigh
- scaglio 3y agoYou mean OAuth? It should be a good thing for a social.
- mavhc 3y agoYep, having 100s of community run servers storing passwords is a terrible idea
- the_third_wave 3y agoA decentralised social network which tries to distance itself from centralised social networks, hence no surprise that they do not offer Google/Facebook/Apple/etc. login.
- qwerty456127 3y ago"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.
- pseg134 3y agoImagine if you read a book and just enjoyed it! Is there an app for that?
- qwerty456127 3y agoAre you kidding or do you really feel like you need an app for such an occasion?
- greedylizard 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- qwerty456127 3y agoI see...
- scubbo 3y agoI'm 99% sure they're kidding.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gotshadowban 3y ago[flagged]
- juliasct 3y agoIs it Goodreads 2.0?
- ecshafer 3y agoGoodreads 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.
- smcleod 3y agoAnd it’s owned by Amazon, who have no incentive to make it any better than it is.
- merdaverse 3y agoI mean, they kind of do, they own Kindle, so you would think it would be in their interest make it non shit to promote the books on their stores
- 9erdelta 3y agowhat is /lit/?
- bitdivision 3y agoI'm guessing the 4chan board?
- dri_ft 3y agohttps://4chan.org/lit/catalog https://4chan.org/lit/catalog
- raybb 3y agoI assume OP is talking about the 4chan message board. Here's Reddit thread talking about said board https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/6ghfe5/have_you_guys_ever_been_to_lit_4chan/ https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/6ghfe5/have_you_guys...
- cubefox 3y agoIt 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.
- bavarianbob 3y agoI 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. 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.
- masukomi 3y agoThis 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.
- bluepod4 3y ago> mass-dunking on a book that hasn't come out because they disagree with the author's politics Sometimes this is a positive depending on the particular politics (i.e. nazis).
- LightHugger 3y agoThat 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.
- saltysalt 3y agoOther than being distributed which is interesting, how does this differ from https://www.librarything.com/ https://www.librarything.com/ ?
- Apofis 3y agoIs 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.
- pryelluw 3y agoI’ve looked and haven’t found anything. My default is to browse the used but book stores inventory and read a couple of pages to get a feel for the book.
- vorpalhex 3y agoOddly 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.
- Kye 3y agoI 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.
- pknerd 3y agoAS far as tracking is concerned, Goodreads works fine for me. I am not sure why should I use it.
- malwrar 3y agoOne good reason might be more data ownership than tracking. Centralized platforms seem to at some point realize how valuable their user’s contributions to the site are, and change the deal eventually to e.g. lock things behind a paywall when they grow bold and/or can get away with it. Reddit and Twitter are two high-profile examples of this, but there are numerous examples from the past as well for things like nutrition tracking and cd cataloging. A federated model might better reflect the idea of community ownership, and prevent site owners from betraying the community and cashing out on their contributions.
- pknerd 3y agotbh, this is not my issue. My only complain with Goodreads is their pathetic UI. My own purpose of using Goodreads is tracking and the UI is so confusing that it takes me a while to figure out how to find the last page I had read and then update it.
- FalconSensei 3y agoon the other hand, I find GoodReads super intuitive. Moved to storygraph and I find the UX there kinda bad. Hard to find stuff
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoYou can still export all your Goodreads activity to a .csv file. Amazon has so given up making any improvements to the website, that I don’t even expect them to remove functionality like that. I don’t believe that Amazon considers users’ contributions to Goodreads valuable, it only bought the site to 1) stop paying Amazon Associates referral fees to the independent corporation that Goodreads was, and 2) to stop Goodreads from directing any book-sale traffic to its competitors.
- lukas099 3y agoWhat would be the easiest way to migrate my book lists from Goodreads to this (or anything else?)
- michaelmrose 3y agoSeems 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. In particular its nice that calibre actually allows one to read books in the library in a web interface. 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.
- jrm4 3y agoWhat about a federated social network for sharing books, perhaps outside of our present legal framework? 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 emerge a better way to pay writers.
- bovermyer 3y agoFor me, this is too much effort. Instead I have a page on my site that tracks my books read. https://www.benovermyer.com/kb/books/ https://www.benovermyer.com/kb/books/
- Daegalus 3y agoOn a bit of a side note. I have been thinking of rebuilding my blog/site from the ground up to be simpler, cleaner, and have more info. Your site just gave me a ton of inspiration on how to make it better and how to make use of it better. Especially since I am trying to go the more POSSE/IndieWeb route. I was even considering making a historical section where I unearth old projects and sites I built. I recently found the wayback machine had saved some of my old blogs and sites that I have lost, so I plan to back them up and put them up as a historical type thing on my site and your layout gives me ideas on how to do it best.
- bovermyer 3y agoThanks! Also... I never thought of fetching my old sites from the web archive and resurrecting them on my current site... that's a great idea.
- Daegalus 3y agoYa, it happened accidentally. I was planning to play the Warhammer Online private server, and I used to build addons for it. I went digging for those as they were never in source control. Found them in a website, then saw a blog link I didn't remember until I found it on wayback. Then I just started digging and found others I vaguely remembered. I figured extracting them as much as possible and just making it like a museum to my past self. Images are all gone but layout and text is there.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoWhat does "anti-corporate" mean in a software context?
- sizzle 3y agoHope this takes down good reads