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 [email protected])
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.