So I’ve just now looked into bookwyrm despite knowing of it for a while. From what I can tell, it doesn’t federate with lemmy … please correct me if I’m wrong! And this seems to be largely because bookwyrm is largely user based, or at least that’s how mastodon sees it.
But it seems that lemmy and bookwyrm would actually be a good fit? Lemmy is communities with posts with comments. Bookwyrm seems to be books with reviews with comments. This feels like a one to one mapping could work well, no?
From what I gather, there are various bookwyrm instances with different focuses. So from lemmy you could search specifically to an instance for a book/community using key words, which would also work well. Then you could delve into the various reviews and comments etc.
More importantly, this would cross pollinate between the two platforms! And of course, any good review could be easily cross posted to any relevant community here, where all comments from here would also be federated with bookwyrm.
Thoughts?
That sounds cool. I don't know if they'd want to federate with Lemmy and deal with such a huge amount of users - it seems you can't even view anything without logging in? And most are invite-only. So I'm guessing they like the small bookclub feel. Dunno how they operate with Mastodon or federate with each other.
Speaking of that, maybe in general instances could put up some gates that people from outside need to cross if they want to interact. Maybe just "write an introductory post" or something. Current it's either federate fully or defederate completely, and that just sucks.
From what I can tell, you can follow specific users on mastodon. Which I suppose keeps the small book club feel compared to to following all the reviews for a specific book.
Though, I feel like having a specific book as the central structure that you would follow, as the equivalent of a community on lemmy, would also be a good way of keeping a book club feel. It wouldn’t be a “bookwyrm” community where anyone could jump in on any review of any book. You’d get subscribers who already know the book and are interested enough to read and write reviews on it.
They seemed walled off to me.