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 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”.
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
Never liked Goodreads. I always got much better results on LibraryThing.
Surprised theirs no manga dedicated instance
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.
awaiting discogs for books
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.
Yeah, and so much isn’t recognized when importing your Goodreads books. Didn’t like it for that reason.
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?
There is a list of fediverse apps available, not yet for projects in start up. (Or I haven’t found it yet)
I think they’re saying that instead of making a site to track books and site to track music and a site to track movies and a… we could just have one site that’s built to track anything and you just set the category.
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 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’ve only ever used Goodreads to track books I’ve read. What was good about it in the past?
I’m curious about this too. I thought that’s what Goodreads was for, tracking your books.
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 stopped using it a few years ago because people who harass me based on my reviews, esp if it was a critical review of a popular book.
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?
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 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?
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)
Request entity too large does mean that the data you sent is too big for the server to handle.
I don’t know if you could split in half your book list and import it in two parts, otherwise there is nothing you can do, except post an issue to their issues tracker, probably github.
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LOL sounds like it
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.
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!
Here is a small list of instances if you two want to look into it some more. :) I wouldn’t recommend joining bookwyrm.social though, as it’s the biggest one and can be a bit slow sometimes. Also, it’s more in the spirit of the fediverse to spread out over several smaller instances. :D
Also, it’s more in the spirit of the fediverse to spread out over several smaller instances. :D
Yeah, but this is hard to do for most users, as you can see I am using a Lemmy.world account lol, but that doesn’t stop us to have an account somewhere else though.
Genuine question, why is it hard?
Because big servers taught us that way, you don’t join to local.facebook or something like that, you join to the biggest community you find.
Even when we have Activity Pub as a backend defederation is still a thing, so I think a bit of FOMO enters this game as well 😅
Ah, I see, I thought you were talking about technical difficulties or instances being hard to find, but you rather meant habits or mindsets making it hard. I really get that.
But then it’s cool that so many people still decided to join the fediverse, which is, after all, a way smaller network than the big corporate platforms. 😃 Maybe this habit of going for big numbers changes when people get used to the fediverse.I also get the FOMO due to defederation thing, it definitely makes sense. But imho spreading out over several more instances could even help here.
Defederating will always exist, but if there are a lot of small instances and one of them decides to block another one, people on this instance would only lose contact to a fraction of the total content of the fediverse.
However, if there are only a few big instances and one decides to block another, people would get seperated from a whole lot of content.I do see the issue, however, that if you are interested in some specific communities that are on a specific instance and yours, for whatever reason, decides to defederate just from this one, you would lose contact to exactly those communities you follow.
At least I think that’s the way it is. It could also be that you could still follow the communities from a blocked insance and still post and see the majority of posts in it, but you just don’t see posts and comments from users of the blocked instance. I really don’t know.
Either way, Lemmy and kbin are both in early developement stage and if this issue exists there might be a solution for this in the future. 😃
And let’s say the problem does exist and you don’t want to stay on an instance that’s blocking your favourite community, I think emotionally it’s easier to move from one small instance to another small one than it is to move from a big to a small one. 😊
