Bookwyrm - A Goodreads alternative that is part of the fediverse

Fediverse@lemmy.world – 535 points – 1 years ago

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.

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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 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?

I'm curious about this too. I thought that's what Goodreads was for, tracking your books.

I also use it for:

check ratings and reviews.
jump from a book to a series
check if/how book is translated to another language
rarely check book lists

And, TBH. I do not see benefits of making booksread federated. But, probably, I miss something important.