It seems that this federated service falls into the same asymmetry that others have—everyone is joining the flagship instance (which negates the decentralization).
It's incredibly clear at this point - and it was clear a priori also, but with some uncertainty - that this is how federated networks will work, if they do at all. This just needs to be incorporated into any assumptions about these systems. Instead of thinking through the costs and benefits of decentralization with fairly evenly distributed node sizes, it's necessary to think through the costs and benefits of a decentralized system with a power law distribution of node size, because that's going to be reality.
Consumers want centralisation. All of this stuff is too complicated right now for end-users.
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.
You are partly correct. They do not care about details, but they want things as simple as possible, and decentralization makes that harder. See all people complaining (or don't understanding) about having to choose a mastodon or lemmy instance.
And copy+pasting usernames/post links that you have open, to search for it again on your own instance so you can reply... is not simplicity.
I can only guess as mass readers tried to migrate to bookwyrm, how many people would be complaining that they are trying to add a book a friend is reading, but it's not showing for them - because it's registered on another instance but they didn't realize
Or why they see different ratings, or less number of reviews than their friends
Consumers often also don't want to be dependent on local data. I would propose a feature to link (& sync) user accounts across multiple servers, that way no one needs to depend on a single server. Power users can set up their own server and use that as a local copy of all their data.
If I were going to join this, I would seek out the flagship instance. It’s the least likely to shut down a year from now.
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.
They need a brain-dead way to hop between instances without losing data, if it doesn't already exist. Of course this only works well if the instance that is shutting down gives notice in time for people who login in only occasionally to see it.
I disagree that having a popular flagship federated service negates decentralization.
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.
Nah, it doesn't negate anything. The flagship instance is a fine default but it's important to be able to move at any time for any reason and even to run one's own. This is itself a quality feedback mechanism and freedom.
I think this itself is the big benefit of federated services for most people. I'm less concerned with proper distribution of users across instances but rather is users always have recourse should any particular instance get elon'd.
Federation has many flaws, but this is not one of them. It makes sense when the service is new to focus mostly on one big instance instead of many instances with 10 people each.
Case in point:
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 proved it could work. But I don’t understand the market problem this one is solving.
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.
> As users, federation protects us from [the service being killed or development frozen].
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?
Federation can help if you run the software yourself since your identity and your "content" are tied to your instance just like they are with email. As long as you keep it running and make sure the software is up to date with current federation standards you're more or less safe from all those hazards. If the developers of Bookwyrm grow out of their anti-capitalist phase and sell it to Amazon, get that family and realise there is more to life than chasing characters on a screen, get hit by the proverbial Bus or otherwise lose interest in maintaining the project you still have your "content" and identity which you can keep alive by either federating with other ActivityPub-enabled platforms - which will probably lead to a loss of functionality - or maintaining/getting someone to maintain the project for as long as there are interested users. All this stands and falls with the viability of ActivityPub, it will be interesting to see whether the concept pans out in the coming years.
No, that would make it possible to create alternative instances to use if and when the main instance goes belly-up. Those alternative instances would start afresh, without the user base and lacking any content created by them. If there were more than one alternative instance the two would not communicate unless they employed some sort of federation - ActivityPub or something similar - or some mirroring scheme.
Got it! This is an important distinction - open data not just open source. (But throwing back to another recent thread - I think this is at odds with privacy - data can't be both private and persistent beyond the existence of a single server.)
I get it. But how big of a demand is there for that? Does the average Wednesday night neighborhood book club care? I am not denying that there is value there for someone, but most people don’t care. People that read books at a level of enthusiasm to join a network about reading don’t think about that stuff. Federation is a feature but it really isn’t an above the fold concern for the vast majority of the potential audience.
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.
> Federation is a feature but it really isn’t an above the fold concern for the vast majority of the potential audience.
Federation is a feature, not a benefit. I read your other comments and generally agree. To be fair, the feature vs benefits (that people care about) is an ongoing problem will nearly all new products (I've clicked into) that are shared on HN.
You'd think by now more would get it, but they don't. Instead, it's more, "Ooh! Ooh! Look at our features..." but as you said...no one cares. I would say it also falls under the product classic "don't make me think." Yeah, if I had the time I might be able to convert features to benefits but that takes effort. Sorry. I'm out. Next!!!
Benefits! It's all about me. F*k your features. What are you going to do for me (i.e., benefits)?
I'm with you here. I'll be bullish on federation when I understand what non-ideological problems it solves. I totally share the ideology! (And I get the sense that you do too.) But that's not enough. It needs to be useful to be durable.
> Claiming that federation is ideological is itself a very ideological statement.
No, it isn't.
Federation is ideological because it is not (yet?) in and of itself a useful feature. It is a feature desired by people (like myself) who have an ideology that attracts them to the idea.
Ask yourself: What is the selling point of federation / decentralization to someone who does have any ideology whatsoever with respect to technology? I want there to be a good answer to this question, but I've yet to see a compelling one.
When the site you use goes bad/offline/whatever, you can easily move to another. If you're moving from a site that went bad/offline/whatever, do you want to lose all your data again next time?
Federation is what keeps SMTP in place as the default electronic communications channel. Alternatives come and go but SMTP abides, there to cover your posterior when that fancy instant shout channel app flips over and goes the way of the dodo.
While many of the current proponents of federation are wont to explain the concept in line with their own ideologies - usually in the form of references to anti-Capitalism, Anarchism or some form of Marxism, often mixed in with a heavy dose of MDS when it comes to proposing alternatives to Twitter - this does not make the concept of federation ideological. It just makes it a widely applicable concept which has shown its usefulness for a very long time.
I don't think people fall back to SMTP when a chat product goes away, I think they find a new centralized proprietary chat product.
SMTP survives in its federated form because of path dependency. And people didn't start using email because it was federated, they started using it because it was an entirely new capability to most people. The federation was how its creators managed to implement such a thing at that period of time, but nobody in the 90s was saying "email is great because it is decentralized!", they were saying "email is great because I don't have to wait days for a piece of paper to travel across the continent and it's cheaper and faster to type than to make a phone call!".
Another commenter put this well: decentralization / federation of social networks thus far seems to be a feature but not a benefit. What is the benefit to users, what can they do with a decentralized network that they couldn't otherwise do? So far, the answers to this are ideological, the benefit is "I don't want to use an application centrally run by XYZ corporation, and this lets me achieve that goal". I think that's incredibly reasonable, but it is downstream of ideology rather than utility.
> I don't think people fall back to SMTP when a chat product goes away, I think they find a new centralized proprietary chat product.
...after they told their "friends" (i.e. other users of the failed app) via email about that hot new app that is totally going to be the place to be. That is what I mean with "SMTP abides", it is there and will be there while the centralised proprietary churn comes and goes. SMTP is easy to set up, compatibility is close to guaranteed - Google's attempts to turn Ee-mail into Gee-mail have failed, Microsoft never managed to extend/extinguish it - and it runs on just about every piece of hardware known to mankind. Upkeep is simple as well, the spam problem has been solved a long time ago, email generally "just works".
It can even work as a chat server by using something like Delta Chat [1] if you're turned off by the "old school" user agents.
> ...after they told their "friends" (i.e. other users of the failed app) via email about that hot new app that is totally going to be the place to be.
There may have been a time when people spread the "hot new app" via email, but it ended decades ago at the latest, when Facebook came out. But I dunno, even before that, I heard about this kind of thing on AIM or one of the many other ones that already existed at that time.
But you don't have to convince me that email is great! Or that federation in general is architecturally satisfying. I'm right there with you and most other tech enthusiast.
But that's all beside the point being made here. The point is that federation is not why email was successful, or why it persists. It was just an implementation detail of a capability that was fundamentally novel to most people when they first came across it.
But that novelty is not the case for "Twitter - but decentralized!" or "Goodreads - but decentralized!".
> But that's all beside the point being made here. The point is that federation is not why email was successful, or why it persists. It was just an implementation detail of a capability that was fundamentally novel to most people when they first came across it.
Nope, hard disagree there. If the mail-related protocols had not been federated - i.e. had email relied on a single-source centralised server - it would not even have survived into the 90's. It would have come up against a host of commercial competitors and eventually would have succumbed to some "Microsoft Network"-like thing which would have come pre-installed on Windows 95. Only Greybeards would use email, the latte sipping set would use Apple Mail, most of the rest would use whatever Microsoft presented them with. That was the original intent of the Microsoft Network as described in the first (hardcover) edition of Gates' book "The Road Ahead" [1] in which he envisaged a future where the internet gave way to the "Information Superhighway" based around proprietary technologies.
Definitely. I hate that Shelfari is dead and that Goodreads sucks. That's why I clicked on this comment thread. But what should convince me that this product will not be dead? Sure, I believe that it won't be killed by Amazon in particular, but why should I be convinced that it will survive on its own terms?
It will need a community to survive, so I think people being excited about it is a great first step. I feel comfortable investing into building a community knowing it won't be purchased and killed. That doesn't mean success is guaranteed, but it is a prerequisite for me to invest in a social network at this point.
I'll add that a vertical like books probably has a better chance of succeeding than a more general purpose social network, because there's always going to be value in providing metadata around books, it's timeless information more like wikipedia than twitter. I see a lot of value in creating a community driven and community owned corpus of book information and reviews.
But if it will need a community to survive, then the selling point can't be "it won't go away after you use it for awhile". Or if it is, it needs some compelling narrative for why it will definitely attract a durable community.
FWIW: I think this product looks really great and already does a bunch of stuff I want, and looks waaaay better and runs waaaay faster than Goodreads, and those are all absolutely big selling points that I think could break through with the general book-loving community, and I think that's awesome! But I just don't think "it is decentralized" or "it will definitely not die" are clear selling points for it.
If it needs a community to survive, you first need to bootstrap that community. People who care about federation and are willing try federated projects seem like a great community to help things get started. Especially because like I said earlier, this is in a vertical where value isn't locked into social silos. Reviews that these users make won't only be read by early users who they know, but will provide value to all future users.
It's normal and actually required to start with early adopters and innovators before reaching more mainstream audiences.
Sure, I definitely don't begrudge them their choices! It's their product, if they think this is a good way to bootstrap it, that's up to them.
But my feedback is that I think a better way to bootstrap would be to focus on figuring out what book enthusiasts dislike about the current products in this space and building that (for what it's worth, I think they're also doing a pretty good job of this!), and on figuring out a financial model to sustain the project for a long time.
But I can do it that way when I build a product like this, they certainly don't need to care a whit about my feedback.
i suppose you could start by not coming into threads and shitting on it sight unseen but instead look at ways you can make it better, so that you can have an alternative to shlfari and goodreads.
I haven't once shat on it, and it isn't sight unseen, I've been playing with it since I saw this link. I think they've done an excellent job with it, and I really hope it succeeds, because I really want something like this.
But I also think briandear is fundamentally right that for this to be successful and thus useful to me for more than a short period of time, it needs to have a selling point that doesn't only appeal to computer nerds like me who know what "decentralization" even is, and care about it.
> She would never think about joining Bookwyrm because the value prop makes no sense to her. Why does anyone care about federated?
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."
Does it matter what most people care about? I don't believe the goal is to get all the traffic from everyone wanting such a service. I think the people who do care about having a site that isn't driven by ads and corporate interest would not want a billion people using the service. So it is self selecting for like minded individuals which keeps it niche. This also keeps it less likely to be flooded by fake reviews because it isn't worth doing to a smaller audience.
>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.
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.
Actually, even before that line they have a much more prominent subtitle: "Social Reading and Reviewing, Decentralized".
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.
Yeah this would make sense, sort of like how posts here include what programming language some product is written in, because we're interested in that sort of thing, even though it isn't part of the general messaging of the product.
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!".
> What does “anti-corporate” even mean? That is going to turn a lot of users off because it feels political.
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.
Lots of FOSS stuff exists because of small capitalist corporations helping support, build features, host and so on.
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.
Where does it get the list of books from? I thought that was always the biggest challenge with sites like Goodreads etc. Goodreads both (A) pulls data from Amazon, and (B) has an army of volunteer "librarians" who have additional privileges to merge duplicate books etc.
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.
Wow, I just realized Open Library covers like 80% of Goodreads as well: read/to-read lists, ratings, yearly reading goals. Seems like https://openlibrary.org itself would be a fine Goodreads alternative if you don't want to set up your own Bookwyrm instance.
What it sadly is missing is the data. My first try, I found 2 out of 3 books in a series missing, and the first book was missing data. It looks like ImportBot [0] adds them somehow, but it’s not clear how this is done and how it could be fixed as there’s no information on the user page. As much as I’d like an open solution, if I have to add every other book I read to the database first, that will make me stop using it quickly.
Hi, can I ask what books were missing? The more examples we have, the more we can update our bots to make sure these books get either imported or fixed within our search engine.
I completely understand wanting to use a service that has the books you're looking for and would also completely understand if it's too much work to type up the examples. If you'd rather not do so publicly, happy to receive your email at <mek@archive.org> and do what I can to help. Thank you!
Hey, sure: The Series is by Glynn Stewart, Scattered Stars: Evasion, Book 1 Evasion [0]
Here it already only has the printed version, not the main kindle version (his books are KDP, so sadly Amazon-exclusive). It’s also lacking the Series title (Scattered Stars: Evasion), only having the book title "Evasion".
Missing from the series are Discretion (Scattered Stars: Evasion Book 2) [1] and the new Absolution (Scattered Stars: Evasion Book 3) [2].
Looking through his other works, they all seem to only have the print version.
I’m also not sure if the ImportBot [3] is official, or just one huge contributor, but it could really do with some kind of information, including how something like this could be fixed, or if it can.
I have been using the Open Library app for almost a year now. I am very satisfied with it.
After GR removed the ability to add books manually by users and added stringent rules for them to be added to consideration by "librarians", I stopped using GR.
I read a lot of obscure books that often don't have ISBN or an webpage (!). I can't track them or add them! It was so unfair.
So, I moved to OpenLibrary and have been using it ever since.
That's awesome. May I ask, for pre-ISBN books, do you typically look up books by title? What do you do with books when you find them? What is your primary use case / reason? Is it as a reference library (of things to read)? Keeping track of reading?
Yes, by title. And I often find out about them from friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. I also find out about a great deal of books from other books, either mentioned or cited/referred to.
I read some books cover to cover, and some are kept as references. Books are mainly on Math, Philosophy, and History. There are other topics, too.
I read in 4 languages and GR is very Anglo-centric. That's another issue.
I wanted to track my to-read and read for every book that I found.
I cannot do that with GR anymore.
(I am unsure to whether you are asking about my use case about the sites or the books. So I answered both.)
very helpful, thank you. Good to learn international use case is working okay for you (I know we can improve). If you're not on our slack already, feel free to email me @ <mek@archive.org> -- you're welcome to ask questions and weigh so we can continue to try to move in the right direction for you and others.
Copyright law is a plague on contemporary free society. I'm a composer, I work on contemporary Western classical music, and finding written music published since 1923 is a full-time job in itself. It's relatively easy (still not easy) to find extremely famous composers (e.g. Philip Glass, Gyorg Ligeti, Jennifer Higdon etc), but if you're trying to find someone lesser known, or god forbid someone unknown published by some random European music publishing house, good fucking luck. They literally won't make the publication available to you if they decide. Some works are only available for performance (i.e. if you're allowed to play this music, they "rent" the sheet to you) and no option to study the written work for other authors. It's excruciatingly difficult and holds the entire field back multiple, multiple decades. People write about ideas that were already explored and in circulation almost 4 decades ago because it's likely impossible to read their works.
Let me not even begin to talk to you about finding papers (analyses of other artists' works, musicology etc) if you're not affiliated with a university. You need a fortune to keep up with the field, or be arrrg (and it's not easy to find musicology papers in SciHub compared to other fields).
In this aspect we're significantly worse than how things were back in 1800s, 1900s or early 2000s.
> god forbid someone unknown published by some random European music publishing house
One of the most striking developments in the last 20 years is that so many of those European publishers are making a lot of their study scores free to read online. Apparently they have given up trying to make money from ordinary music lovers and are OK with selling just to performers and libraries. Back when I became a huge fan of a somewhat lesser-known European avant-garde composer, I despaired that it would cost many, many thousands of euro to buy the study scores of all his pieces. Now they are right there for free on the publisher’s website.
Otherwise, piracy largely fills the gap, although many composers have some famous piece, the score of which is impossible to ever see. Boulez’s Répons and …explosante-fixe… are my usual examples of this – all the rest of his scores have circulated in pirate circles for well over a decade. Someting like Magnus Lindberg’s KRAFT is probably not easily found because its score is a meter tall and therefore difficult to scan.
Hmm I'll be honest, I always have very difficult time finding both of the options you listed. Not aware of any publishing house that share contemporary sheet music for free, nor do I have a good source for sheet music piracy. For piracy, I try the standard sources such as Library Genesis, Pirate Bay, Google "X PDF" etc... and almost never get something for niche composers in the last 10 to 20 years.
Universal Edition, Edition Wilhelm Hansen (now part of Wise Music Classical, I think) and Boosey & Hawkes are examples of publishers who have put up a lot of scores by 20th century composers for free. The Finnish Music Information Centre website has many scores by Finnish composers of recent decades.
With regard to pirated scores, that mainly happened on filesharing networks like Soulseek and DC++.
> almost never get something for niche composers in the last 10 to 20 years.
Why don’t you just write to them and ask for a PDF? As you know, composers are usually happy to hear of any interest in their music, and (just like academics and their research papers) they don’t always agree with their scores being “behind a paywall” for personal use.
A necessary evil as long as the publishing industry continues to have a choke-hold on copyright law. IA recently lost a lawsuit trying to fight this “digital copies must be lent like physical objects” nonsense.
It's actually a lot worse than that, you're mistaken. IA recently lost a lawsuit that argued that. The court ruled that when a digital copy is shared "a new copy is made" on the computer of the person shared, so you can't even do the common practice of buying 3 physical copies of a book and digitally sharing 3 copies at any given time. It's because if you have 3 physical copies of a book, once you share it digitally 3 times, you already exhausted your privilege and not entitled to those 3 copies any more. It makes absolutely no sense, and makes US Copyright law unreasonably and extremely maximalist, even though US copyright law was already relatively maximalist compared to other countries. We live in the dark ages.
This unfortunately isn't up to them, its the publishers that are enforcing this arbitrary restriction. In fact, IA landed in some preeeety hot water recently for fudging the rules on this very thing [0]. If the IA could get away with handling out an infinite amount of e-books I'm sure they absolutely would.
It fetches data from the public APIs of openlibrary.org and inventaire.io. From my point of view, inventaire is really great as it synchronizes with wikidata and is far better at not duplicating works or authors.
I _think_ it's just things users have added. This is a fediverse app. It's not some centralized list of books that people are working from. It's not limited to English books, or even US books.
The one thing they're missing for me is private notes. It's super important to me to have notes of where I heard about a book that's on my to read list.
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.
Super into a book-focused social network! I was on Goodreads last night and it’s a pretty hollow shell. Such a great idea to have a place to talk about/recommend books!
On a bit of a side note. I have been thinking of rebuilding my blog/site from the ground up to be simpler, cleaner, and have more info. Your site just gave me a ton of inspiration on how to make it better and how to make use of it better. Especially since I am trying to go the more POSSE/IndieWeb route.
I was even considering making a historical section where I unearth old projects and sites I built. I recently found the wayback machine had saved some of my old blogs and sites that I have lost, so I plan to back them up and put them up as a historical type thing on my site and your layout gives me ideas on how to do it best.
Ya, it happened accidentally. I was planning to play the Warhammer Online private server, and I used to build addons for it. I went digging for those as they were never in source control. Found them in a website, then saw a blog link I didn't remember until I found it on wayback. Then I just started digging and found others I vaguely remembered.
I figured extracting them as much as possible and just making it like a museum to my past self. Images are all gone but layout and text is there.
Goodreads is a pretty bad site overall. Its good for tracking which books you've read I guess, but I don't think its better than a google doc sheet. The average reader there doesn't really have good taste in books. You are honestly better off just using a google doc to track your books, and use /lit/ for discussions and recommendations, since /lit/ has much higher quality reviews, and discussions than good reads. Maybe a federated good reads will be better as it filters out a lot more people and might get rid of a low brow stuff.
Goodreads isn’t just for fiction or popular-interest non-fiction like /lit/. You can also use it to track any book with an ISBN. I’m in academia and am constantly reading specialized literature, and I keep track of it on Goodreads because why not. I’ve had a lot of great interactions with other users who are similarly learned and perhaps working in parallel fields to my own. If you aren’t limited to the mainstream part of the website where mob behavior rules, you will be interacting with very different – and frankly much more worthwhile – people.
I'm probably being dumb here, but what do you mean by /lit/? I can't figure out how to turn that into an Internet thing (website? social? what is it!), and searching for /lit/ is predictable not helpful. Always looking for a good source of book discussions and recommendations!
> The average reader there doesn't really have good taste in books.
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.
This touches on things I notice in modern literature, it’s not really about books. There’s a lot of these “book club” books that suck. I am 99% certain it’s just pay to play. The books are kind of melodramatic and not good, with basic prose and themes that are overdone, but will be well regarded as you say. I think it’s because there’s a lot of this culture around “being someone that reads books” so you have people that post memes or wear book t shirts or whatever. But they read the books npr and Oprah recommend.
The reddit discussion for /lit/ is hilarious. It's sad how even reading books has become some political thing. God forbid I like an HP Lovecraft story because it's creepy.
Some of the comments have this "I like how honest and unrestricted /lit/ is, but why can't we have that without all the Nazism and patriarchy" vibe that's just so incredible, I sort of stare at them in amazement.
It really just shows how Reddit often “doesn’t get it”. If you don’t want that stuff then just don’t look at it. But Reddit also due to the voting system just kind of tends towards this lowest common denominator malaise of mediocrity. /r/books, /r/literature or even something like /r/fantasy just tends towards talking about a few popular easily digestible books or meta topics.
In case someone needs it spelled out to them: 4chan became such a great place precisely because your allowed to say what you want there. Participating is easy because you can be honest and don't have to police yourself, and as a result posting there becomes FUN.
Can you give an example of a thread on /lit that is of notably higher quality than what can be found on reddit and call out specific comments that wouldn't have been made without benefit of anonymity?
I was put off by the gross fire hose of drek on other boards on 4chan when I looked at it initially but note lit seems to have actually reasonable discussions. That said it doesn't look to my eyes notably different from say reddit save for the intermittent random gross like slurs tossed about which add nothing whatsoever. If folks were banned for calling each other slurs one would hope the same people who had something to say could just say it without including the slurs.
I don't have specific examples as I am not a regular reader of lit, but I can comment on "it doesn't look to my eyes notably different from reddit." The anonymity, lack of up/downvotes, non-hierarchial layout, lack of moderation, and heavy focus on images creates a very different experience from reddit. Some say this leads to better and more organic discussions (I agree for the most part), but I think they're only going to be as good as their community. Anyway, there's no reason you can't use them both.
> specific comments that wouldn't have been made without benefit of anonymity
Open any thread and you will find tons of examples, no reason to post them here. But I expect you meant specific comments that are valuable and insightful? Probably a matter of taste. On reddit it is at least much easier to find highly-rated comments, which is a plus for voting.
I opened many threads and see zero examples of discussion that couldn't have happened here on or Reddit. The only things I see which couldn't be posted here are offensive and worthless. Can you post a single example?
You see many examples of comments, I'm sure, that look like they could happen anywhere.
And you continue to believe that, right up until you see a comment just like them, that gets someone banned from reddit. And then you're irate, and you wonder why you were banned. But you can't even get much explanation, because having been banned from reddit, they've taken the one way you might use to demand the explanation.
But even that's not the full picture. Sometimes there are people whose "contrariness" is a bit higher than other people's. And they refuse to participate in places where they aren't allowed to say whatever they want, even if pretty much all the time they'd never say anything that would get them banned. Are those people more interesting than others? Who knows, you'll never find their stuff on reddit.
I think in the legal world, you call this over-moderation a "chilling effect". You don't have to censor everyone, it turns out, if you can scare or bully them into self-censoring.
Eventually, I think, everyone sees what we're talking about. It's just by the time it's so overt that even you can't deny it anymore, there won't be much anyone can do about it.
> If folks were banned for calling each other slurs one would hope the same people who had something to say could just say it without including the slurs.
You'd hope that, but it doesn't work that way.
In a place where you can be banned for the gross slurs, you might be banned for relating some personal anecdote in which you speak of some other person making a gross slur. Why, when you didn't type in the gross slur yourself?
Who knows. Maybe they think you're secretly a klansman, trying to pollute people's brains with the slur without actually saying the slur. Maybe they think you're not sufficiently progressive enough because you actually have a personal history where you were proximate enough to a bigot that you could hear what they were saying. Maybe it really is Orwellian, and you thought the word though you didn't put it in the comment.
But considering the extra effort it would take to post in such a place, always wondering if the next comment will get you banned, why would you bother?
People with interesting things to say will find it difficult to exist, belong, or remain in such a forum.
I don't think you get any of the good, without accepting that some of the bad has to be present too.
These people who do that sort of banning, somewhere in their shriveled little brains actually believe they're making the world a better place.
I don't think we have to choose between no moderation and excessive moderation nor between 100% anonymity and none. Consider our nicks we each chose the level of anonymity we were comfortable with.
I think if you consider the space of probable commenters and comments and the average quality of discussion obtained by the probable commenter that produces a comment you ought to be able to figure out why removing the producers of some comments improves quality of discussion.
Consider a discussion about an interesting new piece of tech into which a commenter inserts an ad for soap. The comment is not worthless it is worse it has negative value because every reader of the thread must consume more noise to get to the signal. The probable future contribution of the commenter is 99.999999% likely to be negative because commenter is obviously a robot pushing spam. If you allow it then soon your threads will be 90% ads and soon 100% ads because actual people will tire of wading through the slop. Then your threads will only be available on archive.org because the spammers murdered you.
Now lets consider an offensive human being. They see everything in the world as a jewish conspiracy against folks like themselves. They ARE capable of normal communication but they are prone to tracking back to their odious and tiresome conspiracies. First the discussion was about finance aaaaaaaaand now we are talking about Jewish people running the world. Most readers experience this commenters words as offensive and tiresome. Some waste mental energy for the nth time debunking the obvious nonsense. In general the perceived quality of the forum declines and the more content like this we have the more value we lose as other readers go elsewhere.
Unlike the robot have something to lose here both ways. Focusing on the folks you lose because they can't use slurs and not the people you lose because they won't hang out some place they get slurred is a fundamental failure of analysis.The poster may be capable of providing valuable contributions we will lose if we drop an instant banhammer here but we have even more to lose by keeping him on with present contributions. Why?
Two factors:
- Smart helpful content takes energy and the kind of person who you actually want to write commentary has many demands on their time because they actually do useful things. By contrast your uncle who doesn't work can cut and paste or type the same screed from memory at spam bot like levels. Given a chance bad commentary will dominate by volume
- The kind of person capable of producing useful comments is dramatically less likely to also produce bigoted screeds because the through and intelligence needed to produce such allows one to either not think like that or at least to talk about finance without injecting such.
That is to say there is high value in each ban and little of value lost per commenter banned. In fact almost all value that might be lost can be retained by watching new commenters and have them receive polite negative feedback or official warnings instead of instantly banning them when the transgressions are not egregious.
If your uncle can control his tenancy to track back to conspiracy theories he can contribute if not then not much of value has been lost.
Again focusing on the folks you lose because they can't use slurs and not the people you lose because they won't hang out some place they get slurred is a fundamental failure of analysis.
r/books is a disappointingly bad sub. I subbed there for a while, but it was filled with the same recommendations over and over (which is the problem with any recommendation subs).
The kicker for me, though (and the reason I unsubbed) was when the mods barred any posts complaining about the casting of Roland in the Dark Tower adaptation that was made several years ago, on the grounds that the only reason for anyone to disagree with casting Idris Elba was racism. People pointing out that changing Roland's race fundamentally changes his relationship with Susannah (and possibly even has implications for Susannah's relationship with Eddie) had their posts removed.
I use /lit/. It definitely does have Nazism and patriarchy plastered over it. If you dig around, there are great posts there. But it is a valid complaint.
I'm wondering, do you take more issue with the Redditors saying they don't like the far-right stuff on /lit/ than you do with the actual far-right stuff on /lit/? Or are you commenting on the political nature of the entire (/lit/ + Reddit) system?
> I'm wondering, do you take more issue with the Redditors
I joined a subreddit a few years ago, printSF, I think (not sure) thinking that it might be more to my liking. The regular science fiction subreddit seemed to be more about Marvel movies (it's not just reddit that does this, scifi.stackexchange might as well be harrypotter.stackexchange).
I tried to like it. I saw books and authors that were unfamiliar (that should be good... it's difficult to find new stuff I enjoy). But then I started digging into the comments, and it was complete drek. There was one day when I must have read through two dozen, and "Bechdel" was in every single one of them. I don't think I knew what it was at the time, but one of them was a comment haranguing someone else about it, and so I enedd up learning that day.
Another time, someone mentioned Asimov's Foundation in a recommendation thread. The replies were bizarre.
It's clear that whatever they were after is nothing like what I want to read. We're not wanting the same genres. And I don't know why. It'd be one thing if these same sorts of people who were concerned with all that bullshit were happy and well-adjusted. Then it would mean that I was just some old fuddy-duddy and that the world had moved on without me. But they're not happy or well-adjusted, and they seem as if all they want out of this (and everything else) is to ruin and trash what they can.
I suspect that too many literature classes in public schools and community colleges are to blame. They can't listen to or read a story and just enjoy it for what it is. Everything must be deconstructed and hidden meanings revealed, the sort of hidden meanings only they're clever enough to see. And that opens up the cracks for their weird-assed politics to be inserted into it. Then every interaction between every two characters is homoerotic, every dystopia is a critique of capitalism, and the only horror permitted is how conservative modern governments are.
So yeh, I guess you could say this is a bigger problem for me than some halfwit in mama's basement trying to be an edgelord on 4chan and failing. And I hesitate to say that too loudly most of the time, because even though none of my words here are offensive, having described my personality there are those who would seek to make sure I'm not allowed to post ever again.
So I guess the differentiator for you is that the 4channers are trying to be edgy, meaning they do not take their extremist positions seriously, whereas the redditors are more serious about their political statements?
I can't be the only one with a burgeoning appetite for an experience that is solely focused on the individual. I don't care about being social in this domain and that opinion often feels like a contrarian one. I want to track my books, my thoughts on those books, and my upcoming queue. 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.
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.
This is a fediverse app. there are no algorithmic recommendations.
> 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.
That kind of information should not be hosted on a website though, because if the website goes down you'd be losing all that tracking data, all those thoughts and all those plans. Maybe if there's a way to export everything in one click and you take regular backups. But a service like that is the worst place to store data that you'd rather not lose.
... this is an open source federated app. There is NO reason you can't run your own instance that you control and back up that participates in the network. IF you don't want to pay for expensive hosting, but want it to be always on, then throw it on a raspberry pie and run it from home.
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.
If you want a solo experience, just a note/knowledge managment-solution of your choice. I mean there are many apps like Tellico or Calibre who are somewhat focused to this domain. But you could also just use Notion, or Obsidian to maintain something of your own.
I love the idea of more book-focused social networks! Curious what the motivation here is to make it federated, instead of focusing on high-velocity user-focused product development. My greatest gripes with existing book-social-media-networks aren't the federation, but rather the dated UX.
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).
Well, that's a license I've never seen before! This makes it entirely unpractical for any company to host a server, which is an... interesting approach.
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.
One benefit to federation in book-focused social media is it helps stop Amazon from buying the centralized services. They bought Goodreads and Shelfari. It's great to know they won't be buying the book-iverse.
What’s wrong with Amazon? They made it possible for self published writers to actually make a living. They disrupted the big five publishers and have done a lot for independent writers. Even the indy bookstores require an author to go through corporate publishing gatekeepers. Amazon gives literally any writer an opportunity to sell books.
Amazon is too big. It attracts too many bots and fake reviews. They also have no incentive to remove fake positive removes as it is a conflict of interest for them to sell as many books as possible.
I buy tons of books through Amazon and own a Kindle. That being said they're horrible at running book social networks. Of the two they bought they killed one and froze development on Goodreads. A federated book community will stop them from swooping in and killing the whole party.
Oddly enough, their license which prohibits any sort of standard corporation setup from hosting or making copies of the software, would seem to prohibit their own source code being on their own Github.
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.
Really neat to see federation move into a vertical like books. It seems really well suited to books (and music) since you could have instances that focus on particular genres or time periods. I also like the suggestion in their repo that book clubs run their own instances. Very cool.
Seems that one could logically integrate calibre libraries. One could I imagine have a function that rather than explicitly requiring the reviewer to provide the ebook link instead allows the user to click on a "read" button and have it examine the sources that reader knows about including but not limited to ebook sites and calibre libraries.
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.
I remember when this first emerged under the original name (which I don't remember). It was rough, but you could see the potential. I'm glad to see the developer kept at it and that it's making inroads.
If I had to guess (I'm probably not going to sign up), LT centres books while this seems to centre reading. So a bit less "database for books", a bit more "social media for reading"?
It seems the main purpose of "social networks" for books would be to talk about a book you just read. To have a forum for every book in the world. Of course most books are old and few people are reading them, so you would want the network with the largest market penetration among book readers, otherwise people will rarely find anyone to talk to for most books.
What about a federated social network for sharing books, perhaps outside of our present legal framework?
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.
One good reason might be more data ownership than tracking. Centralized platforms seem to at some point realize how valuable their user’s contributions to the site are, and change the deal eventually to e.g. lock things behind a paywall when they grow bold and/or can get away with it. Reddit and Twitter are two high-profile examples of this, but there are numerous examples from the past as well for things like nutrition tracking and cd cataloging. A federated model might better reflect the idea of community ownership, and prevent site owners from betraying the community and cashing out on their contributions.
You can still export all your Goodreads activity to a .csv file. Amazon has so given up making any improvements to the website, that I don’t even expect them to remove functionality like that.
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.
tbh, this is not my issue. My only complain with Goodreads is their pathetic UI. My own purpose of using Goodreads is tracking and the UI is so confusing that it takes me a while to figure out how to find the last page I had read and then update it.
Is there a book review site that actually has credible reviews of comedy books? I realized recently that it’s night impossible to find a useful comedy category.
I’ve looked and haven’t found anything. My default is to browse the used but book stores inventory and read a couple of pages to get a feel for the book.
A decentralised social network which tries to distance itself from centralised social networks, hence no surprise that they do not offer Google/Facebook/Apple/etc. login.
"Track your reading and what your friends are reading" sounds like classic social network bullshit dopamine trap. Like brag about acheivements in how many have you read through this month or be sad about how stupid/lazy you are while others are so smart and gritty. They should better offer sharing quotes/highlights/remarks/explanations/summaries/follow-ups and discussing these.
There are filter bubbles and then there are positive effects from recommendation engines. I'm terrified of the former but I personally love how much music Spotify and even Youtube have introduced me to. And since I find it quite annoying to start a book that I end up disliking, I would love a functional recommendation engine for that.
I feel like it’s a bit different for books than it is from say - taking staged photos of you wearing some fancy clothes while out to dinner.
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.
That’s like saying the /r/books subreddit exists in some form already as the NYT bestsellers list. This is fundamentally different (and noteworthy), as it’s another entry in the fediverse space.
Reddit and Twitter will be around for a while due to inertia, but it doesn't make sense to be making any new investments there. People have one foot out the door.
