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Comment by gregmfoster | Hacker News Reader

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.

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It’s got a very ideologically-driven focus, including an anti-capital source license:

https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm/blob/main/LICENS...

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.

> I'm not sure why the police or military wouldn't be allowed to host a book reading website, though.

Many religions have an injunction against killing or otherwise contributing to the harm of sentient beings.

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.

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.

It's a blatant conflict of interest for the book store and the book review to be the same company.

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 use Amazon a lot, but that doesn't change the rot that set in for Goodreads after Amazon bought them.

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