Rose

Pinterest is mostly useful for saving images from the web, so you can keep all images from related topics together and have a handy backup too.

I mostly use it for saving all the cute turtle photos I found.

Unemployed people use LinkedIn mostly for the job board. The employed people use LinkedIn for the social media features, and oh boy

What do you like most about BookWyrm? Which features do you use most frequently?

Been using BookWyrm for a few months. I add books to my shelves and track reading progress, mostly.

I loved it when I realised that it just lets me add all random books and edit data from the get-go. The service may not have all of the books I have, but I can just add them.

Are there any features or interactions that you find frustrating or unintuitive? What features do you think are missing or could be improved?

BookWyrm absolutely needs far better abilities to split/merge/consolidate author and book information and do more of the Librarian Stuff. The current system of “you can bring in data and stuff just sits there on its own” is nice if you want to manage a personal library and track individual book progress, but a well-maintained book database is an entirely different beast, and pretty much mandatory for enabling more social stuff.

Also, the ability to import book information from sources is nice, but could use some more integration to a whole lot of other places. I really loved LibraryThing’s integration to bazillion different library services.

One minor quibble I have about BookWyrm is that there’s still the notion of “shelves” and that one book can be on one shelf and different editions of one book don’t count. This is good for casual use - “oh yeah I read this one” - but it’s not enough for true book nerdery. I may have a physical, ebook and audiobook edition of one work in multiple languages and the UI doesn’t show me that yes, I own/have borrowed these exact editions and I have reading activity on this and that and that one.

On that note, yeah, should also have some kind of labeling system for individual editions, along the lines of “I own a copy of this and I’ve stored this in the closet” vs “Borrowed this off the library” vs “I had this one, before the drama queen of an author removed it from Kindle”.

How do you feel about the interface (design, readability, navigation)?

It was a little bit confusing at first, but once I got over the initial weirdness I realised it wasn’t that much harder to use than, say, Goodreads. I don’t really have much complaints at this point. It’s good at what it does.

Do you mainly use BookWyrm on a mobile device or on a computer? And why?

Book nerdery is a big girl thing so I use computer for this. The mobile UI is adequate but could use a dedicated app.

Do you also use other platforms (e.g., Goodreads, StoryGraph, LibraryThing)? If yes, what makes you prefer one over the other?

I used LibraryThing long ago, and Goodreads more recently, both with librarian privileges (i.e. ability to edit data, which BookWyrm gives you from the get-go). I think Goodreads is pretty good at what it does, but it did have some mild jank, and of course, I always got the impression that I was doing unpaid labour for Bezos. So I think I’ll go with BookWyrm in the long run, thanks.

I agree. It’s quite unlikely the setup will finish in 33 minutes. Not really, anyway.

Long ago I was exploring some MUD, and it was the usual fantasy game experience. But one area was basically a weird dimension representing the server itself. Instead of monsters it had zombie processes you could kill. And child processes looking at you sadly. Trying to kill them was one of those “top 10 video game moments that made you feel like a total monster” things.

In the late 1990s/early 2000s, there was some satire article about how to get most effective Linux support. Just write an angry news/blog article about how Linux sucks because it doesn’t (insert the thing you’re having problems with here). You bet someone will immediately respond how you’re an idiot and you should (insert detailed explanation of how to fix the thing here).

Debian girl here. We may not have updated anything in 5 years but boy howdy are things stable or what.

Me, I’m old, so I just keep using apt-get, because that’s all we had back in the day, and I never bothered to learn what’s the big deal about apt. It’s just a frontend, isn’t it?

Mastodon is my go-to “shout in the void about my goings-on” platform.

Pixelfed is where I post my original photography and artwork.

Bookwyrm is for my book nerdery, mostly.

Edit: Oh and I have a Matrix account but despite the fact that I mentioned it to literally all of my friends, nobody uses it. I keep it around in case someone actually wants to send me private messages because Mastodon is kinda badly suited for that.

I am definitely going to need my morning coffee. I see the word “Y’all” and I’m somehow thinking “shouldn’t it be Xall if we’re taking about X11? Wait what’s wrong with my brain”

Speaking in general: Creating communities/instances is easy. Moderating them is hard.

In particular: I would love to create women’s spaces. But then I’d have to be on the lookout for the Knights of the True Fedora. They’re out there. Somewhere. Now now, I’m not suggesting it’d be a daily problem! …But the actual daily problems (regular spam and whatnot) would suck too.

Vendor lock-in is bad and Adobe’s business practices are bad, no matter how you cook it. There are so many viable alternatives to Adobe stuff.

Problem is, Photoshop power users don’t often want to hear about any alternatives. GIMP is just one of the most popular culprits in this regard. That’s exactly the kind of mindset that the vendor lock-in creates.

I’m kind of happy that I stuck with GIMP when I was younger. Now, I have absolutely no fear of trying out any software that comes my way. I do most of my photo work in Affinity Photo. Don’t have problems with GIMP either, use it for some other stuff.

The only way to get people to switch from Adobe is to wait for Adobe to make the life unbearable for their own customers. Some time ago there was a huge movement for people to switch from Premiere to DaVinci Resolve because Premiere really is pretty horrible these days.

“The new Windows Terminal is so slick! And PowerShell is soooo awesome! When will Linux get cool neat powerful stuff like this?”

“Uh… About three decades ago?”

(To be honest, PowerShell is neat. But it’s also cross platform, so if I really want it on Linux I guess I can get it there too? I don’t really need to, I’m in middle of rewriting some PowerShell stuff in Python)