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Thoughts on federating lemmy and bookwyrm (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by maegul@lemmy.ml to c/books@lemmy.ml

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So I’ve just now looked into bookwyrm despite knowing of it for a while. From what I can tell, it doesn’t federate with lemmy … please correct me if I’m wrong! And this seems to be largely because bookwyrm is largely user based, or at least that’s how mastodon sees it.

But it seems that lemmy and bookwyrm would actually be a good fit? Lemmy is communities with posts with comments. Bookwyrm seems to be books with reviews with comments. This feels like a one to one mapping could work well, no?

From what I gather, there are various bookwyrm instances with different focuses. So from lemmy you could search specifically to an instance for a book/community using key words, which would also work well. Then you could delve into the various reviews and comments etc.

More importantly, this would cross pollinate between the two platforms! And of course, any good review could be easily cross posted to any relevant community here, where all comments from here would also be federated with bookwyrm.

Thoughts?

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[–] phazed09@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think for me the problem with Bookwyrm (and one of the reasons I'm not really looking to move from Storygraph) is that I don't really see services like Goodreads or Storygraph as social networks. I'm more interested in being able to manage lists, recommendations, progress, etc than I am with interacting with users on those platforms. I think they're so specialized, that federating with those types of apps to Lemmy would end up a lot of noise on both that wouldn't really make sense for either.

The only thing I can see making sense for federation for me is maybe being able to follow a reviewer I like via my Mastdon account, so I can keep track of reviews without having to log into the platform.

That's just my thoughts though, but full scale federation vs something more like RSS to me is where the line between social network and app with social features lies for me.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks! Not a user of bookwyrm, so my thoughts could be nonsense for actual users.

Main reason why I thought there might be something to my idea was that book reviews could be good seeds for conversations about the book itself, whether the parent reviewer is involved in the conversation or not. Which is basically how link aggregators like lemmy work. Except in the case of bookwyrm federation, you wouldn’t need to post the link to an external source, the review itself could naturally work as the parent post.

I don’t know how common it is for conversations to start beneath or around reviews. But maybe it’d be a good thing?

[–] phazed09@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't use Bookwyrm either, but coming from the perspective of Storygraph, I don't really think the average user there wants their review to become a talking point. I'm not really writing them for deep discussion or analysis, just my off-the-cuff thoughts on finishing a book, more for my own sake too. I also don't want to see threaded conversations when i'm skimming over reviews to decide on a book to read. Hence why I think it makes more sense for a publicly follow but don't interact type of federation for those types of services.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Cool. Thanks! Interesting platform ... didn't know it was so sort of inward facing (which I say with no criticism).

[–] emma@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Some thoughts: I find it works better for me to only follow bookwyrm accounts with my bookwyrm. I don't check it every day so it's easy to come back to record finishing a book and find my feed swamped by even a single user's microblogging activity. Book-related posts are just slower and fewer (at least amongst the other bookwyrmers I follow).

I follow my bookwyrm with my mastodon account so I can boost some reviews to mutuals with a shared niche interest. That works well enough. Aside from them being busy and not seeing my posts

If I wanted to repost something on Lemmy (anyone interested in the original novels behind great operas? no? no? you philistines ;D ), I'd probably copy/paste what I wrote and link to the bookwyrm. Any discussion could happen on the Lemmy thread. If I wanted to save that discussion, I could add the link to my comments on the book.

That's somewhat more cumbersome than your suggestion but not much. My thought is that I'd rather have the bulk of a robust discussion on my microblogging or threadiverse account than my bookwrym because of that overwhelming my bookwyrm feed aspect. This would be especially true if my bookwyrm got spammed by a robust discussion by someone I follow about a book I haven't read. Easy to not read that thread on Lemmy.

As both platforms develop, it might be possible to create a good interface between them. I don't know enough to evaluate that. Just some thoughts from my experience using both mastodon and bookwyrm with each other.

[–] chris@fedia.io 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I can see that following a book might make sense. Maybe put a feature request in at https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm ?

[–] weirdwriter@tweesecake.social 2 points 1 year ago

@chris @maegul I like this idea too!

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I’ve spoken to someone in masto who was already going to make some similar suggestions to the devs in their matrix, so I’m sure the idea will get passed along.