[sanderjd]

Definitely. I hate that Shelfari is dead and that Goodreads sucks. That's why I clicked on this comment thread. But what should convince me that this product will not be dead? Sure, I believe that it won't be killed by Amazon in particular, but why should I be convinced that it will survive on its own terms?

[bluefishinit]

It will need a community to survive, so I think people being excited about it is a great first step. I feel comfortable investing into building a community knowing it won't be purchased and killed. That doesn't mean success is guaranteed, but it is a prerequisite for me to invest in a social network at this point.

I'll add that a vertical like books probably has a better chance of succeeding than a more general purpose social network, because there's always going to be value in providing metadata around books, it's timeless information more like wikipedia than twitter. I see a lot of value in creating a community driven and community owned corpus of book information and reviews.

[sanderjd]

But if it will need a community to survive, then the selling point can't be "it won't go away after you use it for awhile". Or if it is, it needs some compelling narrative for why it will definitely attract a durable community.

FWIW: I think this product looks really great and already does a bunch of stuff I want, and looks waaaay better and runs waaaay faster than Goodreads, and those are all absolutely big selling points that I think could break through with the general book-loving community, and I think that's awesome! But I just don't think "it is decentralized" or "it will definitely not die" are clear selling points for it.

[bluefishinit]

If it needs a community to survive, you first need to bootstrap that community. People who care about federation and are willing try federated projects seem like a great community to help things get started. Especially because like I said earlier, this is in a vertical where value isn't locked into social silos. Reviews that these users make won't only be read by early users who they know, but will provide value to all future users.

It's normal and actually required to start with early adopters and innovators before reaching more mainstream audiences.

[sanderjd]

Sure, I definitely don't begrudge them their choices! It's their product, if they think this is a good way to bootstrap it, that's up to them.

But my feedback is that I think a better way to bootstrap would be to focus on figuring out what book enthusiasts dislike about the current products in this space and building that (for what it's worth, I think they're also doing a pretty good job of this!), and on figuring out a financial model to sustain the project for a long time.

But I can do it that way when I build a product like this, they certainly don't need to care a whit about my feedback.

[sleepybrett]

i suppose you could start by not coming into threads and shitting on it sight unseen but instead look at ways you can make it better, so that you can have an alternative to shlfari and goodreads.

[sanderjd]

I haven't once shat on it, and it isn't sight unseen, I've been playing with it since I saw this link. I think they've done an excellent job with it, and I really hope it succeeds, because I really want something like this.

But I also think briandear is fundamentally right that for this to be successful and thus useful to me for more than a short period of time, it needs to have a selling point that doesn't only appeal to computer nerds like me who know what "decentralization" even is, and care about it.