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Comment by bavarianbob | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> mass-dunking on a book that hasn't come out because they disagree with the author's politics

Sometimes this is a positive depending on the particular politics (i.e. nazis).

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.

A rock solid digital lib should be abuse-proof or it gonna be not rock-solid.

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