BookWyrm is a social network for tracking your reading, talking about books, writing reviews, and discovering what to read next. Federation allows BookWyrm users to join small, trusted communities that can connect with one another, and with other ActivityPub services like Mastodon and Pleroma.
I’ve been using this for a bit and have some major complaints, the primary one being that reviews and books aren’t shared across all servers. I’m still going to use it to track my reading, but the “social” aspect is straight limited from the start. I want to see ALL reviews for a book, not just the people I follow or the ones on the server I joined. How do you even find people to follow with that level of visibility?
This thread talks through it. https://fosstodon.org/@Brendanjones/110722850962870241
Edit: It’s still way better than feeding your data into the maw of the ever-hungry Amazon, but I want it to be something I can recommend to my non-technical reading folks.
I kind of see the idea. When I check some of the higher quality (to me that means evidence backed with an internally coherent logic to new ideas) nonfiction on goodreads/other platforms, especially early, too many reviews boil down to “reading is hard”.
But it should definitely give you a way to expand to “all reviews”, because I can’t see many single servers having enough of a base to be useful on their own.
So I like the premise, but it’s way too raw for me to transition.
Importing my books from goodreads isn’t bad, but making lists required searching every book I want to add individually. As I like to keep a couple large groups of books and add/update my reading history in bulk, this is a huge downgrade from goodreads allowing me to view my books in a table and checkbox books that I wish to add. (I did download the code with the intent of implementing a better way to add lists myself, but ultimately decided that the time I have available for coding projects is limited and that it was too much to put ahead of any of the other stuff I want to do for now).
I don’t keep that many lists, but I have one of 100-ish nonfiction to split those out and a second for the 50-ish books I consider quality books adjacent to the brain or intelligence, and I really don’t want to go through copy-pasting 100 titles over to replicate it.
Just made an account, and was glad to see an option to import from Calibre. My only gripe so far is that it’s pretty bad at recognizing books with no ISBN registered. It seemed to think a ton of my books were Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows or The Fellowship of the Ring for some reason (or Marx’s Capital in French).
Thanks. Might give it a shot. Don’t usually track my reading, but if I do, I won’t be feeding that data directly to one of the Frightful Five.
