As a bibliophile on the Fediverse, I'm flailing a little. I'm on Mastodon, Lemmy, and BookWyrm.social, but I don't know which is the best place to reach the largest and most active number of fellow readers.
Currently I'm guessing that this is the largest book group in the Fediverse, based entirely on MAU - but I'll be frank, I could easily be wrong.
I'm looking to discuss approaches to reviewing books. It occurred to me recently that the most meaningful and helpful reviews are the ones that tie in to emotion - that emotional impact is by far the most important aspect of art and writing, at least to me. I'm curious to hear what sort of approaches others have tried, and maybe sharing tips.
There's also another issue that's been bothering the hell out of me: BookSNS. It's a book recommendation site that's very active, with a lot of users. I've been following it for quite a while via Mastodon.
Posts from it are echoed or relayed to Mastodon, but replies don't go the other way. Users there seem to think that they are posting on Reddit, at least some of the time. But there is no way to contact anyone at the website itself; no admin address, and you have to have an account there in order to respond on the site. But there are no openings for new accounts.
It drives me completely crazy, because I have a huge amount of experience recommending books - particularly older books. I used to be one of the top book recommenders on Reddit, before I walked away after their IPO sleaze. Over and over I've seen requests for recommendations for which I have the perfect answers, only to find myself absolutely unable to respond.
It's torture. I really love recommending the books that I know, particularly since almost no one else seems to even be aware of their existence. But I just can't get through to those requesters.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
#Books #BookSNS #Mastodon
Oh yeah, I don't know anything about mastodon personally. As for Lemmy, it looks like beehaw restricts community creation to admins (see here), so you'll have to find another instance to host it. I'd recommend an instance other than lemmy.world just for the sake of decentralization, but it's really up to you. Wherever you host it, I'm pretty sure you'll be able to moderate from your same beehaw account.
Literature.cafe already has !bookrecs@literature.cafe that you could try to revive
lemmyverse.net is a good place to explore instances if you want to see your options in terms of community creation. reddthat.com looks pretty agreeable, just to throw something out there, but you might have other preferences so definitely shop around!
!newcommunities@lemmy.world has some advice posted and will be a good spot to post a spotlight once you're up and running
!communitypromo@lemmy.ca is another spot you can promo
@Blaze@sopuli.xyz I know you're pretty engaged with this topic. Are you able to impart any knowledge on this aspiring community founder?