Social reading and reviewing, decentralized with ActivityPub - GitHub - bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm: Social reading and reviewing, decentralized with ActivityPub
Goodreads is perhaps the best example of enshittification imo. It's only good now as a way to track your reading lists.
I tried bookwyrm today and it feels quite polished already, like giving you a guided tour of it's features. Hopefully it takes off as well similar to mastodon and lemmy.
I like BoomWyrm, but they are so many duplicate books because there are so many different published versions of a book. I think these need to be combined somehow. If people really want to choose the cover of the exact book they read maybe you could be able to choose your cover.
That's true, duplicate copies of the same book is perhaps the main pain on bookwyrm right now. On the other hand it also feels like a problem that devs must be aware of and are actively trying to figure out a solution for.
In Whakoom, a spanish website to keep track of your comics collection, they have this functionality to add different editions to the same book, so they are linked and you can search other editions when you’re seeing the book details.
Once upon a time it held a lot promise for book recommendations. You wouldn't simply look for books that had high star ratings, you'd be shown books that other people who had the same profile of likes/dislikes had enjoyed. They had all the data necessary to build an awesome recommendation engine.
I read that in 2012 a bunch of authors (names included Anne Rice, Kiera Cass and Carroll Bryant) made this website called Stop the Goodreads Bullies, a harassment site disguised as an anti-bullying campaign. Goodreads failure to protect its users/ bowing down to them by changing its policy to say that reviews about author's behaviour was off-topic caused people to migrate to booklikes. Were you part of that migration?
I really like it and I'm already using it to track my books. There are two things I don't understand yet: how can I get recommendations, or books that are similar to other books? And what is a good way to find others to follow who have a similar taste in books?
I don't really know what the dev's roadmap is, but I do think that reccomendations shouldn't even be a part of the instance beyond recommendations from your "community" or people who you follow. I think it should be a seperate service/website that imports your goodreads/bookwyrm data and algorithms it while serving ads(meaning their revenue will come from publishers/authors). It can then push recommendations over to your bookwyrm home instance with activitypub. Otherwise each instance will need the data from every other instance just to give you recommendations based on what other people like you enjoyed. It also allows the service to be easily replaced once it starts to go to shit, since there's not a single "this is the recommendation engine".
Books, music, movies and so on all have big differences in how they're best presented, what sort of information they should have, how social features are best integrated. I don't really see a monolithic site that tries to do all of that being better than separate federated sites that can cater to their own unique focus.
Is this like an app or a service? My gf uses Gooreads but I can't picture her self hosting an alternative for it, also she only uses for tracking books, and I don't think that feature sucks... Yet.
She wouldn't need to host her own instance. Like for Lemmy, kbin or Mastodon there are plenty of Bokwyrm instances with open registrations for everyone.
And they all federate with each other and the rest of the fediverse. Which is also good, because books have to be added to the instances manually, but thanks to federation there are already many books added that also federeate between instances (sometimes you just have to import the full book data from elsewhere with one click). Only if it's a very niche book you might have to add it completely, which is fun though imo, because it helps Bookwyrm grow.
And there is the possibility to import your reading data from Goodreads. :)
I tried to import my books from Goodreads but it gives me a '413 Request Entity Too Large' error message. I could import them to Storygraph a couple of weeks ago with no problem though. Does anyone know a way?
No, I'm genuinely asking. Having read more books doesn't make you better in any way, it just means you sank more time into them. But I guess I understand how some would see my comment like that, since there's a lot of snobs and elitism among readers (at least, among the vocal ones)
Ok i get most of the feddiverse but whats the point of replacing goodreads. Or to ask it another way othercthencstopping by for bool reviews what is the point
The point of the fediverse in a broad sense is decentralisation. By having bookwyrm as an alternative everything isn't linked to goodreads. If they ever decide to make it paid only or the company goes down, all that stuff is gone. On the fediverse the posts would be split and hosted across multiple independent communities. This make it more robust Imo