| Hi, Mek here from Open Library. I was incredibly lucky to work at the Internet Archive the same time as Mouse and couldn't be more proud of their work on BookWyrm. Open Library and its network of generous volunteers have (I hope) made a lot of positive progress towards cataloging the books that are out there and making them more accessible to the world. AND it's absolutely the case that our project exists to support innovative projects like Bookwyrm and incredible thinkers like Mouse. Open Library can't and shouldn't be everything. It's hard enough doing well at one thing. The Open Library team is considering how we may be able to participate within the decentralized ecosystem by offering a BookWyrm instance so readers may have more ways to socially engage with each other and connect around books. If you're interested in helping us try this as an experiment, please reach out <mek@archive.org>! I appreciate how difficult it is to run a service which gives communities voices (it requires moderation tooling, staff, and so much more). I'm impressed by the thoughtful, impressive, and creative work Mouse has done building BookWyrm and am super grateful for its progress which I see as being a win for the entire ecosystem (an ecosystem Open Library is proud to be a piece of). Keep it up <3 P.S. the fact that many services like Mastodon or BookWyrm may have large primary servers is not a demerit. The fact that there are smaller local servers, that new servers can emerge over time, and that engineering thought is being put into how data moves through such environments is key to acknowledging the importance of creating safe communities, promoting archival strategies, and enabling accessibility. Many people use GitHub (centrally) and also use Git (centrally) and the fact that many common use-cases have been centralized do not undermine the significance of the times where small, high impact cases are able to succeed because decentralization has made them possible. |