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Bookwyrm - A Goodreads alternative that is part of the fediverse (github.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

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.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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. :)

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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!

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Genuine question, why is it hard?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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 😅

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    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. 😊

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Yeah, definitely I think it is better to have the defederation tools per user instead of per instance, or even if an instance decide to defederate from another one let the user override this change.

    Also about moving across the instances this would be nice when it is officially supported (or the third party tools to work better) to migrate from one instance to another.

    You are right about Lemmy/Kbin being in a so early state compared with almost anything, but I'm glad it is growing so fast (we know why) I definitely see myself being around here for a long time.

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