Episode: 3380
Title: HPR3380: Building a Better Goodreads with ActivityPub
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3380/hpr3380.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 22:24:13

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This is Haka Public Radio episode 3,384 Friday the 16th of July 2021.
Today's show is entitled, Building a Better Godreads with Activity per Bandit's Part on the Series,
Social Media, It is the 220th Show on the UK, and is about 12 minutes long, and Karina Cleanflag.
The summer is, this episode looks at the popular application Godreads to see if it can be done better.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hello, this is Huka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio
and another exciting episode, and this time I want to do another in my series on social media,
and I'm going to report on a talk that was given at the Activity Pub Conference of 2020.
This talk was by Nilesh Trivedi, and the reason I picked this one, I'm not going to necessarily cover all of the talks
there were a lot of them, basically this year 2020, when this conference was put on, was not a good year for travel.
So it was done as a virtual conference, and they had a lot of presenters, and the videos are all available online.
So, and I have a link in the show notes, you can take a look at, for instance, the video for this talk,
and this is the second one that I've reported on from this Activity Pub Conference of 2020.
This one was called Building a Better Goodreads with Activity Pub.
Now, I was interested in this because I have a Goodreads account, which I'm actually reasonably happy with for what I want to do with it.
But I also wanted to see the alternative, and one good reason I think to take a look around at alternatives is that Goodreads is now owned by Amazon,
and that alone is sufficient to raise at least a few questions.
Now, for those who have never explored it, Goodreads is kind of a social platform for book lovers.
You friend people there, just like on any other social media platform.
And then you get updates on what they're reading, what they thought of the book, and you can easily add an item you see from a friend to your want to read list.
But the thing that really drove me there more than anything is that it works as an inventory system, or it can be made to work as an inventory system.
I have a few thousand books, some physical, but the majority e-books, and they're all over the place.
I do own a Kindle, and have a lot of Kindle books, but I once had a nook and have books on that platform, and I have bought books on the Kobo platform as well.
And I have a number of books that I've bought from Kickstarter campaigns, from friends who are authors like Michael W. Lucas, and so on, that are mostly in PDF format and sit on my hard drive.
So as you can see, I had a real problem in trying to keep track of where everything was, so I needed a good inventory system.
Goodreads gave me that very nicely, in a platform that was online and accessible from any internet connected device.
I could add tags to any book entry. Goodreads calls them shelves, but they're tags.
I could write a review of any book I had read, which would be seen by any friends I had connected to.
And I could also easily post the review to my blog site, which in fact I do.
By creating my own tags, I could record where the book resided, thus solving my inventory problem.
And since it was owned by Amazon, there's even a very simple way to add any Kindle books to your collection.
So, I've really liked what it does for me. Still, I like federated media a lot, so I had to see what the alternative might be like.
So, what is Nilesh's alternative here?
Now, Nilesh started his talk by pointing out the many shortcomings of Goodreads, starting with the search function.
For instance, if you review a book, the review is tied to the specific edition, which means that if you reviewed the paperback, someone looking for a review of the hardcover won't find it.
And that's just stupid.
Many Goodreads users have complained about this, but apparently Amazon does not care.
Nilesh went looking for alternatives and found OpenLibrary.org, which is a project of the Internet Archive.
Now, OpenLibrary was created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Cale, Alexis Rossi, Anan Chidi Potu, and Rebecca Malamud.
And you've probably heard at least some of these names before.
The idea is to create a web page for every book ever published.
They also have been making books available for borrowing, but were sued recently by the publishers, which was in the news, I'm guessing you've heard of it.
Now, Trivesh liked what they do, but it wasn't what he wanted to do.
And you've probably heard that said that in Open Source, it's all about scratching your own itch.
So Nilesh had a particular itch to be scratched.
And when he thought about it, he decided that reading per se was not what he was most interested in, he was interested in learning.
And he saw that he used a variety of resources and media formats to do that, which could include websites, apps, videos, and so on.
Now, this immediately made me think of the variety of tools I used to study Spanish, which I've talked about separately, so I'll put a link in the show notes anyway.
So I got his point right away.
So what Trivesh described as his ideal was a social network of lifelong learners.
The problem would then transform into how to match the right learning resource to the right person.
So he has set out to build a site called LearnAwesome.org, which he defines as a combination of good reads, activity pub, and a learning map.
It is, of course, an Open Source project that would love contributions, and I have a link in the show notes that you can take a look at the GitHub site where the project is hosted.
Now, the model he is working with, and if you're at all interested, please watch the video. There's more there than this review can cover.
The model he's working with is that you have a topic.
Each topic can have up to two parent topics.
In the example he gave, for instance, machine learning would have both computer science and mathematics as parent topics.
Each topic then generates an idea set, and there are also experts linked to the idea set.
For each idea set, you get items, and for any item you can have reviews, and so on.
The activity pub component lets you follow people and get updates in your mastodon feed, for example.
So just like good reads sends me emails when any of my friends reviews a book or adds a want to read listing, I could get something similar in mastodon,
or indeed in any activity pub implementing application.
But really makes this interesting is that the search feature is much better than good reads.
Trevesh does a demo in the video which illustrates what he can do.
For example, he can search for podcasts about programming and find all of the recommended podcasts, see who reviewed them and what they had to say, or take a topic and see what resources they have.
Since this is all open, the idea is that the members contribute to content.
So, I decided I would create an account, I logged in and decided to look at languages as a topic.
There were a number of languages listed, but Spanish was not one of them.
So I decided to create an item to get the Spanish part going, and I picked the Coffee Break Spanish YouTube videos for my first item.
Now, I will probably add some more items to help flesh this out.
Right now, the topics are more heavily weighted towards the computer science topics, which no doubt reflects the interests of the initial users, who are all developers.
I did encounter one glitch, which generated a server error on my first attempt at posting a review, so I got cautious and wrote it in a text editor the second time, and paste that it in, which worked perfectly.
I noted that in addition to your public review, you can also add some private notes to the item, though I could not think of a reason to do that in this case.
Learn Awesome also has a browser extension that lets you add a flashcard for any item you find on the web.
Then there is a Slack bot that is integrated if you need one.
It is early day still. The project has only been in existence since June 2019, and of course 2020 has not been exactly the best year for making progress, but it already looks pretty interesting and has a lot of features.
Now, one of the next goals is to get to the point where you can generate a syllabus on a given topic that is personalized.
The example that was given was you might get a sequence like first read this article, then watch this video, third, then try this exercise on this platform, four, then follow this set of users.
So that would be an example of a syllabus.
Now, incorporating activity pub.
This does let you get notifications on mastodon, but there is so much more.
The activity pub model lets you define objects, which could be books, videos, websites.
It lets you define actors, which could be persons, companies, services, activities, which could be likes, reviews, posting a message,
and then collections. It could be followers, users, things like that.
Now, from here, Nilesh went into the technical details of how the appropriate messages are structured and sent, but I'm not a programmer.
So I will simply refer you to the video if you want to see those details.
The big missing piece right now is that it is not truly a federated application yet, but it looked to me like Nilesh knows this is a problem to be solved.
But even without the federated component, I found this application very interesting.
And yeah, maybe someone out there in hacker public radio land is intrigued by this and wants to help out this project.
And that would be wonderful. I think they're doing some good stuff.
But for now, this is a hookah for hacker public radio signing off and as always encouraging you to support free software. Bye-bye.
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