Two online services at least became untenable for me last year. The first was Twitter, which was never great, but nonetheless was the closest thing to an online public square that we had.
The second was Goodreads. It started well but was acquired by Amazon and it was all downhill from there. I kept it up as a reading list, since it was synced to my Kindle automatically. But it had long lost its ability to recommend books for me.
As an aside, the Kindle itself has lost appeal for me over the years, but that’s another story.
Curiously, both of these have federated replacements! For Twitter of course there is Mastodon. As for Goodreads, I was pleased to discover Bookwyrm.
Both of these platforms are based on ActivityPub and work in similar ways. One chooses an “instance” based on speciality, knowledge domain, political persuasion, language etc., and after creating an account one is able to follow and interact with other users on the same instances or those federated with yours. Kbin and Lemmy do the same thing for Reddit. There are Fediverse versions of platforms popping up all the time. Even Meta is getting in on the act.
Using Bookwyrm is simplicity itself. It allows you to maintain reading lists. And rate them, and follow other users of course and see what they have to say. All without any monster corporation getting in the way.
As is common with the Fediverse the primary problem is choosing an instance (the second problem is moving from one instance to another when you discover you’ve chosen the wrong one…).
As for myself I chose the Rambling Readers, mainly because it is UK-based.
Signup is much like Mastodon. Choose a username and create a profile.
Thereafter one can import your Goodreads lists, or just browse and add your own manually.
Will this replace Goodreads? Like Twitter, probably not for a long time, for many. But there are an ever-growing number of readers looking for somewhere else to get inspiration, so let’s see where this goes.
In the meantime, you can find me here.