Thanks!
backpackn
joined 2 years ago
I've been using it for 3 months and enjoy it too. It's especially nice that you can add new books to the database yourself. In Goodreads you had to join a group, message the admins, and pray to Odin. It's great that Bookwyrm copies over your Goodreads books and reviews. At the moment I rarely visit the site, only to bulk-post book reviews, check my feed, and see who's on the discover page. Like my experience with all federated stuff so far, people there are more quiet, private, and reserved, which doesn't lend super well to a review database. So I still check a book's reviews on Goodreads before getting it.
I was happy to find an alternative though. Distancing from Amazon is for the best, and to make it easier Goodreads recently went through an awful design change. Everything on the page is bigger, more book data is hidden, and some data disappeared completely. They also refuse to make a dark mode and have a buggy app. Bookwyrm being federated with the ability to boost reviews is nice too.
It’ll be interesting to see how we value creative expression by AI once it’s indistinguishable from a professional’s potential. In this case it sounds like the quality was noticeably worse and they have every reason to be upset with the result.
Incredible list, thanks for linking everything! I look forward to checking out yattee and netnewswire. Probably a lot more. I'd add Omnivore (Pocket alternative) to the fully foss list. And Proton Drive is out of testing now I think.
What will the next social media trend be? Seems like the centralized options are done for (FB, TW, Reddit), but they’re not being replaced by any single solutions. Tiktok took mainly genZ. Professionals have been wanting a twitter replacement to move to since musk and have yet to figure it out (bluesky, tribel, post social, takes, mastodon, etc has no apparent frontrunner). Political apps segmented some off like parler and the right stuff. Decentralized and foss apps have all kinds of solutions but won’t likely ever attract a huge crowd. So are we seeing the end of of an era of massive centralized social media?
Headsets already feel outdated. They seem inconvenient, uncomfortable, and take you away from life instead of enhancing it. Whatever happened to google glass? I disliked that for many reasons but at least it wasn’t a headset.
Omnivore! It's just a "read it later" app, but so nice to use. I enjoy newsletters again, because they all go there instead of in my emails, and they all have a uniform look to them now. Sorting by labels and syncing highlights to my Obsidian inbox page are great features. And they said bulk editing is coming soon.
Also bitwarden, lichess, and qbitorrent.
You’re right, your IP is anonymized after 1 week. Their privacy policy seems great to me. I just turn off uBlock origin for Ecosia and don’t mind quickly scrolling past a couple of ads at the top of results.
It’s my firefox default search and I rack up a ton of trees for doing many quick and basic searches. If I ever need a more complex search, I use a different site. It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing commitment.