Tag Archives: decentralization

Moving on from GoodReads to BookWyrm

Books, Pals, Save.the.world, , , ,

Friends, I’ve read a lot of books.

I started tracking books a long time ago on LibraryThing, when LibraryThing was giving out a CueCat. I liked LibraryThing, but they never got as popular as GoodReads, and I had friends who actually used GoodReads. So I moved on to GoodReads to be with my friends, since community trumps technology. I really wish I could have used the functionality of LibraryThing but still kept tabs with my pals. Sadly, these folks want to have a walled garden and don’t value interoperability.

Both of them ended up shutting down their APIs, which sucks because I wanted to use my data for me! I ended up routing around their damage.

But what a bunch of palaver!

I don’t want to give my data directly to Amazon (the owners of GoodReads). I don’t want to lose APIs or access to all the data that I’ve been putting in. I also care about my friends, but not that they use the same website as me!

So I was incredibly excited to discover a great book tracker in the Fediverse!

I think you should come with me and you should join BookWyrm.

BookWyrm is a social network for tracking your reading, talking about books, writing reviews, and discovering what to read next. Federation allows BookWyrm users to join small, trusted communities that can connect with one another, and with other ActivityPub services like Mastodon and Pleroma.

https://joinbookwyrm.com

BookWyrm is open source, decentralized and federated. It’s built on top of the ActivityPub protocol like Mastodon.

What does that all mean and why is it important?

BookWyrm is open source. The lead developer has a day job as a baker and isn’t trying to build an empire. When I wanted a feature that didn’t exist, I didn’t have to ask a product manager, I was able to open a Merge Request to contribute a solution! The documentation is also open and easy for anyone in the community to help improve.

BookWyrm is decentralized. That means it isn’t just one website like Twitter, GoodReads, FaceBook, LibraryThing, etc. It is made up of many sites – there are 22 sites live as I write this. If you don’t like one of them, you can leave and move to another, you’re not locked in to the choices and beliefs of whoever owns a server.

And Federated means that all these sites speak about books to each other in a special set of ways called ActivityPub. Some of these sites are for folks who speak a certain language or live somewhere or are interested in a certain kind of book… But if you have a friend on a different site, you can still be friends! The sites all speak to each other in a federation of small common websites. Bookwyrm has good people on it – you can find a good like minded community or span across communities.

And because BookWyrm speaks ActivityPub, it means that people who left Twitter for Mastodon can be friends with you on BookWyrm – they can comment on your books safely from their own community! It’s as natural as sending emails from your work to someone else’s.

And when I want to just get the books that I marked to-read so I can search for them across multiple places, I don’t have to spend a ton of time faking my way to get my own data. BookWyrm is here for me, not as a place trying to find a business model to exploit me.

So when you join BookWyrm, please – say hi and let’s chat about books– I’m @mttktz@bookwyrm.social!

Let’s not be friends on facebook.

Pals, Politics, , , , ,

Let’s be friends right here.

I’ve got a website and I’ve got a feed reader. That’s how I “publish to the world”. See, all Twitter and Facebook really are is a way to post and get a feed of all the things your friends are saying. But someone is selling your friends to you.

You can get a website for free. You can get a feed reader for free. Google Reader or Bloglines or net news wire – etc.  There’s tons of feed readers out there.

I like google plus, and yup, I’m on google plus.  It’s got the same privacy concepts as diaspora, but unfortunately centralized.

I’m on twitter and identi.ca.  But they are just microblogs.  Oh – they also have direct messages!  That’s micro-email!

So just email me.  Just get a WordPress or Blogger blog.  And when you want to step up to your own website, I’ll help you set that up and import all your old posts in. It’s super easy.  No one will sell your friends to you and someone else’s website going down won’t blow up yours.

Ditz – the distributed issue tracker

ditz, , , ,

If you are using a distributed version control system 1 you get some really cool benefits and some really strange problems.

When I was toying around on a project with Aaron, I fell in love with ditz. We needed a quick way to keep track of bugs, without taking the time to set up a central bug repository. We wanted a bug tracker that could live in the same place as the code, where adding a friend to kick in on code didn’t require more accounts being set up and maintained.

Ditz did all of that, works straight from the command line, and even outputs some sweet html pages for display to the world.

Ditz is kind of abandonware right now as the original author has gone on to other things – but the state it is in right now is just perfect for my personal projects. If you are using it, I’ve added an RSS feed for the html output.

And the really good news? I just convinced the maintainer to make me a co-maintainer. So that means that I can integrate features! Once we get enough in for a new release, I’ll post an update right here!

  1. like git or darcs or mercurial, etc.   (back)

How could you hack open subtitles?

Art, Pals, Politics, Video, , , , , , ,

The Miro open subtitles project just got funded at kickstarter.

The promise is an open source of subtitles for video. Now the subtitles won’t be restricted to the people who made the video. They are anticipating use for the hearing impaired and for translations.  Why am I excited?

The project is also designed to make this decentralized, so that it can be implemented by other video players, and so that users can subscribe to multiple sites of subtitles.  That’s the interesting bit!

I’m seeing subtitles as commentary, subtitles with contrasting dialogue, snarky notes about continuity issues and product placement, or political connections…  Imagine the amazing ShiftSpace web experience 1, or Google’s Sidewiki, but for video.

It’s just cream that the project was funded by tiny donations from lots of strangers 2.

  1. I know Mushon through Eyebeam and Add-Art   (back)
  2. I’m one of them   (back)