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.
True. Popular books being read by millions of people have no reviews. That’s why I’m on the LibraryThing now.