I recently discovered Bookwyrm and am really liking it. It’s not quite as full-featured as The Storygraph or Goodreads but it covers all of the most important functionalities and it’s federated which I appreciate. Something that it is missing Vs either The Storygraph or Goodreads at the moment is volume of reviews (ie. Volume of users.) However, your review won’t get lost in the sea so much and I’ve found that it’s been quite easy to find readers with similar interests.
Anyway, who here is using Bookwyrm? What’s your account so we can all follow each other? (Mine is Unfreeze4257@books.theunseen)
While the initiative is very well appreciated, I don’t like using social platforms for the purpose of reading. I used to have a goodreads account but I deleted it and replaced it with an offline app, openreads, which offers basically everything I need to organize my hobby.
I just don’t need most of what online platforms have to offer.
Very fair. I enjoy the social/review sharing aspects of these sites. Plus the install isn’t exclusive to one device since it’s on the web.
Agreed, sort of. I use Bookwyrm but I don’t get the appeal of “social reading”. I don’t discuss books with others because my taste in books is lame, my opinions are usually controversial among book enthusiasts and I would rather not have people looking at what I read. Bookwyrm is also apparently much more expensive to run per user compared to most federated services so I feel bad for costing the instance admin money. But I don’t want to switch to a completely offline or personal instance because I like being able to sync across multiple devices and get book recommendations from the larger instance’s database.
This comment also reminds me that my reading has been paused for several months and I should get back to it.