Tag: bookwyrm

Inspiring books for a publicservice internet

The branches of the Fediverse diagram

I have been thinking a lot about the public service internet (or the notion of a internet which is focused on public value not extraction and surveillance)

Theres a number of things in my head but one of them is about collectively sharing what we mean. When I say we, I literately mean exactly that. I was reminded of this a while ago while looking at my diigo group I setup ages ago. Ultimately its a aggregated list of links from a pool of people.

In practice it didn’t really work because although I did accept a few people, almost no one added any links to the group. In actual fact I’m looking for an fediverse version of diigo because I’m really not getting that much out of it. I did get some spammers but not enough to cause any problems, harm or use much of my time. I could glance at their profile and easily work out their intentions.

Anyway I do think the pooling/aggregation is a good idea within a human scale group.

While listening to tech won’t save us and looking more into the Degrowth movement, I found a number of books by the guest Jason Hickel. I did what I normally do is add them to bookwrym as books of interest. Then thought wonder if there is a category or tag option. I found lists and the ability to change the visibility and contribution options.

So I setup a public list and the ability to carefully add contributors.

Ideally this could be really good and a useful list for me personally listening to a lot of public service related audiobooks. It could also be useful to collate some of the lesser know books and authors. But even better is the ability to share wider what is meant by a public service internet?

Interested in joining the group? Get on bookwrym or setup your own instance and click the button to join the list? Of course if I don’t accept the request (I’m new to this too) just direct message me.

Back to the link sharing, I realised this is what Lemmy is…kinda is. I may take a different route on link sharing and potentially self-host it myself. Once I do I’ll likely just move away from Diigo completely, shutting down the existing groups. Don’t worry I have already gone a export of the links and data.

Looking forward to reading and sharing more.

Little update on Bookwrym

I now have a group which can add to the book list, I’m carefully adding people who are collaborators. If you feel this is also you, contact me.

Twitter is all but dead for me now

Dead twitter bird

Twitter is all but dead for me now, I’ve been fed up and rarely even look at it. However over the last week, the API change just put the last nail in the coffin for me. Last time they did similar I was close to leaving back then.

Even then I did say one client for twitter is a bad idea and its time to double down on mastodon. I do wonder how much of this has changed too?

Now Twitter clients, Cawbird (linux), Plume (android) are facing problems and I’m seeing problems with Crossposter too.

Its clear the owner and business model has decimated this microblogging platform and its time to leave it alone. Decided not to leave only because like a few other web platform, I hold on to the user cubicgarden and ianforrester just incase.

So glad I joined Mastodon in 2017. I can be found on the fediverse on @cubicgarden@mas.to (general account, one I use the most)
@cubicgarden@twit.social (tech account)
@cubicgarden@scholar.social (academic account)
@cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io (music and lifestyle account)
@cubicgarden@bookwyrm.social (books I’m reading and have read)
@cubicgarden on Pixelfed (pictures I’m sharing around the fediverse)
@cubicgarden on Peertube (where I’m sharing new mixes, likely to move in the future)

Expect a lot less of me tweeting from now on… Reading about Twitter under a public remit is just super sad reading now.

Moving from Goodreads to Bookwyrm

BookWyrm

I have expressed my annoyance of Goodreads along with so many others. When I read this piece about Bookwyrm, I pretty much moved instantly.

Good to see Data-portability working as it should. About 2mins to export my reading lists and books out of Goodreads and then about 3mins to pick an instance of Bookwyrm and setup an account, then about 5mins to import the books and lists.

Great stuff!

A better way to review books online?

A good read

Angela is absolutely right in her post about the sorry state of Goodreads.

Last year, I lamented the poor design of Goodreads — a much-needed platform where readers can review books they’ve read and track those they want to. Poor search functionality, ugly aesthetics, an embarrassingly terrible recommendation algorithm, and buried club and group features make the site unpleasant to use. Since the story came out, Goodreads hasn’t done much to improve its deficiencies. Instead, it seems content to rest on its laurels as a near-monopoly owned by Amazon, benefiting from its massive existing user base while being, apparently, deserted by its design team.

It is a joke, even ebay has made changes to improve not just the look but experience of their system (not to say its great however). Goodreads feels like sites before web 2.0 boom. Regardless it has a massive audience, I can’t work out why either?

The post talks about all the different examples people are doing to create their own goodreads alternative using sites like Glitch and Medium. Its a good-read (pun intended) but I found it interesting there was no mention of some of the indieweb (hreview microformats) and fediverse systems (Bookwyrm).

Of course all of them require more technical effort than a webly, glitch, etc but I thought it would be worth mentioning.

Some interesting Indieweb developments

Person with chromebook
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Update with more conference details

I’ve been keeping an eye on whats happening in the next/web3/fediverse/indieweb space, here are a few things I found interesting

Theres a virtual conference about everything Activitypub.

Activitypub.rocks –

A conference about the present and future of ActivityPub, the world’s leading federated social web standard.

Looks like a good virtual conference, and don’t forget to register for it.

One to mark the calendar and another one…

I  noticed there is a Fediverse #SummerSchool, sessions and sign up here.

I was mentioning webmentions to someone the other day and wondering if there was other places webmentions could work beyond the typical scenarios. So when I saw Whim (a command-line utility for sending, receiving, and working with webmentions) with these features

Daemon to receive and store incoming webmentions
Webmention verifier, suitable for scheduled operation
A tool for sending webmentions, individually or en masse (given a source URL)
Commands to query a local database of received webmentions
Simple webserver to display webmention-powered comment sections as HTML, suitable for JavaScript-driven insertion into an otherwise static webpage

Talking about indieweb and fediverse software, I’m impressed the long list of other software projects. Theres some neat projects there including

  • dokieli looks good as its hits so many of the standards I’m interested in, especially the web annotations.
  • reel2bits looks like funkwhale but maybe more webby
  • gath.io is a quick and easy way to make and share events. Events are public with the special link, its like what doodle.com does.
  • bookwyrm is a federated book reviewing system, aka a fedi-goodreads

Lastly a couple of things, although loosely indieweb/fediverse related.

I was interested to hear Kaliya Young on Floss weekly recently. Kaliya I have met a few times at the Mydata conference. Self-sovereign identity and the use of verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers is a interesting area. I get the concept but haven’t had the chance to set one up yet. Last year after going to the Indiewebcamp, I setup indieauth which works in a similar way? In actual fact, it finally worked for me on retrying it.

I felt Kaliya did a reasonable job of explaining it but you can tell by the questions she was getting, people were not following. I recommend the Mydata 2018 talk although its moved on quite a bit. Don’t get me wrong its a very difficult thing to get, especially with audio only.

However I did catch Kaliya saying how important standards are and some kind of implementation. I very much agree, this is why I love what the indieweb community do. It also reminded me of something I heard on the twit podcast network too. Protocols not platforms – Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech.

Lets also not forget the experiment I’m part of with Web Monitization. So far its pretty good without having to block access to my postings. I’m sure there will be an update in a future blog post.