2y ago

Bookwyrm - A Goodreads alternative that is part of the fediverse

github.com GitHub - bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm: Social reading and reviewing, decentralized with ActivityPub

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.

52 comments

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.
- It has this already - see editions under the book. Some books have been added incorrectly as new books though.
- Storygraph has this too, but they helpfully provide an "editions" button on each book and you can then select the exact one that you're reading.
  Could be a solution for this app too.
- 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.
- awaiting discogs for books
- Yeah, and so much isn't recognized when importing your Goodreads books. Didn't like it for that reason.

Ooh, I love a good book app.
I've been using Storygraph more than GoodReads lately, but I'll have to check this out too.
- Yup, I’m a StoryGraph user as well, does everything I’d need a book app to do

I've only ever used Goodreads to track books I've read. What was good about it in the past?
- 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.
- discussion and recommendations.
  but now it's mostly shit, like anything that is remotely social media. crazy power users and bad faith actors are all over the place.
  
  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'm curious about this too. I thought that's what Goodreads was for, tracking your books.

Never liked Goodreads. I always got much better results on LibraryThing.

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".
  
  Yes, that would make sense. Guess in the meantime I just have to keep searching for people with similar taste to follow.

Now I'm curious, anybody working on a discogs alternative?
- wouldn't it make more sense to make a more generic federated list site that could be used for any category of things you wanted?
  
  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.
  
  There is a list of fediverse apps available, not yet for projects in start up. (Or I haven't found it yet)

Surprised theirs no manga dedicated instance

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. :)
  
  Ahh, that was what I was guessing, but a quick search didn't lead me to anywhere 😅
  I'm glad more causal users get to enjoy this then!

Is there something like that but for series and films? A Foss alternative to justwarch or tv show tracker?
- Wow that’s a great idea

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?
- Is this a humble brag for how many books you've read?
  
  LOL sounds like it
  
  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
  
  That and people could make versions for niche genres. Like a Bookwyrm for westerns or one for romances, or one for sci-fi. Or one for NSFW stuff.

52 comments