In an ideal world, my data would live on the instance but as soon as its mutated a local copy is sync'd through the browser/app. That way it's my data, and if the instance goes down, I can choose to sync it somewhere else.
Ideally this would be packaged up in one application, so for different kinds of "sites" the mechanism for syncin'g and migrating would be the same.
Consumers want to not care about the details. Most people don't care much about federation, p2p, full decentralization or centralization, until something crashes. As long as they have no problems, they would even play with the devil.
Centralized solutions, tend to be easier in usage, faster, and with a more stable moderation who maintains the peace. This is something decentralized solutions can't easily replicate, but it's not like it's impossible. It's just that so far not many are trying to climb this mountain, because implementation and maintaining of centralized systems is also easier.
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.
The point of decentralization is not to destroy the ability to centralize (see e.g. git versus SVN and then look at github).
The advantage is that federation and decentralization empower an entirely new set of use cases, archival strategies, development, and accessibility affordances that may have not been possible before. While enabling the town square & metcalfe's law that are advantageous to many people / use cases.
- The Mastodon flagship instance has 25% monthly active users of the total network https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon
- Lemmy flaghsip* (which is newer than Mastodon) has 38% https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
As time goes by people will distribute over the other instance. And even now it's not so bad as you make it seem.
* Not even the actual flagship maintained by the developers, but one created by the community
You either appeal to people who really care about decentralization (an extremely small group) or you're not really decentralized.
It still allows you to pack your shit and move somewhere else should a narcissistic billionaire buy the flagship instance.
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!
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.
Honest question: Does it?
Personally, I worry significantly more about bit rot on projects that make no money. Does federation solve that somehow? What I'm usually looking for is: What is the incentive for people to keep working on this? Is it a passion project made by one or more young people? What happens to it when life happens to them, when they want to start families, etc.? Is it a prestige project from a wealthy person? I think this is less risky, but wealthy people get bored... Or is there reason to think they can get a decent amount of donation money like Wikipedia? This is probably best case scenario, but does it work for niches? I dunno.
Does federation overcome these challenges in a novel way?
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.
Why she even need to worry or know about it being federated? She would just a list of book clubs and choose one (in my case I chose an instance based in the UK because ... I'm in the UK.)
All 'Federated' means is - "if no one is talking about a particular book in your local book club, you can also opt to take part in conversations going in other book clubs."
A free site to discuss books with others doesn't make sense to her? The first line on their website says "BookWyrm is a social network for tracking your reading, talking about books, writing reviews, and discovering what to read next." Sounds like that might be your step mom's jam.
>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.)
I agree why would she care about any of those things - she's just signing up to a site to talk about books. You're the one focusing on those things not her. I honestly struggle to follow these complaints from tech-oriented folks on tech-oriented websites tying to say that some phantom person who isn't tech oriented will just be deeply lost.
You talk about products based on the audience - here on Hacker News it makes sense to talk about the fact that this is federated and activitypub based, at your step moms book club you'd just talk about the fact that it's a social site for books.
So it does seem that the federated nature is what they consider their main unique selling point for everyone, it's not just a framing for the HN audience.
But in this case "decentralized" and "anti-corporate" are prominent in the messaging. "Decentralized" shows up twice above the fold, and both things get their own icon, also above the fold.
I'd really love federation / de-centralization to be an implementation detail of useful products, where someone posts here, "Hey, you know this awesome new product that's getting lots of traction? Here's a blog post about how they implemented it using ActivityPub because it allowed them to launch and get network effects way faster!". But that never seems to be what I see. Instead it always seems to be, "Hey check this new product out, the selling point is that it's decentralized!".
Those people can use any anodyne corporate option they 'choose' (read: Amazon). No one is stopping them.
Tbh, if someone thinks that corporations are cool and friendly, to the point where they're scared of using a non-corporate book club, then I wouldn't miss them. Their absence would actually be a big value proposition for me.
The project itself is hosted on Microsoft Github! Hm, I wonder if Bookwyrm is technically breaking their own license by hosting with Microsoft.. since git "copies" code.
It means that the creator is in for quite a shock as to what kinds of books are about to start showing up.
Does whatever maximizes Amazon's short-term profits, probably.
Most people never learn and fall for the same tricks every time. Bait and switch, enshittification, and the chickens come home to roost.
> hard truth time
So other people are either lying or to soft to accept the truth? Please spare us.
I was incredibly lucky to work at the Internet Archive the same time as Mouse and couldn't be more proud of their work on BookWyrm.
Open Library and its network of generous volunteers have (I hope) made a lot of positive progress towards cataloging the books that are out there and making them more accessible to the world. AND it's absolutely the case that our project exists to support innovative projects like Bookwyrm and incredible thinkers like Mouse.
Open Library can't and shouldn't be everything. It's hard enough doing well at one thing. The Open Library team is considering how we may be able to participate within the decentralized ecosystem by offering a BookWyrm instance so readers may have more ways to socially engage with each other and connect around books. If you're interested in helping us try this as an experiment, please reach out <mek@archive.org>!
I appreciate how difficult it is to run a service which gives communities voices (it requires moderation tooling, staff, and so much more). I'm impressed by the thoughtful, impressive, and creative work Mouse has done building BookWyrm and am super grateful for its progress which I see as being a win for the entire ecosystem (an ecosystem Open Library is proud to be a piece of).
Keep it up <3
P.S. the fact that many services like Mastodon or BookWyrm may have large primary servers is not a demerit. The fact that there are smaller local servers, that new servers can emerge over time, and that engineering thought is being put into how data moves through such environments is key to acknowledging the importance of creating safe communities, promoting archival strategies, and enabling accessibility. Many people use GitHub (centrally) and also use Git (centrally) and the fact that many common use-cases have been centralized do not undermine the significance of the times where small, high impact cases are able to succeed because decentralization has made them possible.
I have a half-finished project that scans barcodes with the webcam, looks up the information in openlibrary, speaks the tile out-loud and records the output to a file that tellico can import.
Some people might note that tellico can take a list of ISBNs on input, so the extra step of OL lookup seems redundant. A lot of bookstores put their own barcodes (sometimes over the ISBN) and there can be namespace collisions between those barcodes and the ISBN. Looking it up on OL and reading the name out loud lets you catch these issues when scanning. There's nothing worse than scanning hundreds of books and then having to go back through to find the dozen of them that scanned wrong; by reading out-loud the OL information, you can just set them aside immediately and enter the information manually later.
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 :)
I had the pleasure of seeing the CEO of StoryGraph, Nadia Odunayo, at a Ruby conference a year or so ago. She was a keynote speaker and she was absolutely wonderful.
Nadia gave a presentation on encountering a Ruby bug, but presented it as a mystery story with chapters and narrative storytelling. Definitely one of the best, entertaining presentations I've seen in a long time.
RubyConf 2022: Keynote: The Case Of The Vanished Variable - A Ruby Mystery Story by Nadia Odunayo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5eVFVHKuDE
Instead I have a page on my site that tracks my books read.
For people who want to have an honest discussion with a fun dose of rudeness and name-calling, it's great.
Massive problem everywhere. Sometimes I'll read some well-reviewed book-club sort of book, and it's usually somewhere between middling, and really bad. I once encountered one of those from a major publisher and aside from not being very good to begin with, it didn't even seem to have had a test-read done before it went to print—there were multiple parts, and one egregious chapter, where it looked like the author had done a major re-organizing edit then never gone back to iron out the wrinkles, such that the text would contradict itself line-to-line, like two or three versions of a scene describing different action, sequence of events, and circumstances re: things like which characters were present, had been hastily mashed up then never fully reconciled. This was plainly not a some intentionally-ambiguous literary device, but an oversight that left the reader unable to know what was supposed to have occurred. You'd never know what a mediocre story and technical mess it was from reading online reviews, though, unless you dug deep into the one- and two-star stuff (and found a reviewer of that sort who hadn't DNF'd it after the first couple chapters), plus other people I know who read it didn't even notice—one did, and we both got to stop feeling like we were taking crazy pills when we compared notes. WTF.
All I can figure is a lot of people just skim everything, so are used to filling in lots of narrative gaps in their head or accepting the gist or outcomes of bits that don't make much sense to them and moving on, which would also explain why the quality of the story, characters, and writing aren't something they really notice, if it's all coming through to them rather impressionistically anyway and they're painting the rest of the picture any way they like. I dunno.
TL;DR I find book recommendations nearly useless unless I've got a good sense of how a reviewer's quality-o-meter is calibrated. Star ratings from a broad, general audience are entirely useless.
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.
> 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.
Sometimes this is a positive depending on the particular politics (i.e. nazis).
also, because it's federated, all the data you add is backed up on all the other instances that federate with yours. It isn't easy to recreate from their copies, but it's not lost.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For me I follow friends who have similar tastes or interests as I know there’s a good chance I might like what they’ve been reading so will often ask them what they thought of a book if not on the site - when we catch up in person.
To me, that form resembles the majestic Titanic, steaming away in the moonlight.
