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Musing about Bookwyrm. i have an account on Bookwyrm.social, which i abandoned when it wasn't federating properly and wasn't getting fixed after weeks. i now use sfba.club. it's got over a hundred users, but that's dwarfed by bookwyrm.social's thousands. and I'm easily one of the most active on sfba.club.
so here's what I'm noticing: bookwyrm has even more of a problem connecting people to the wider bookwyrm fediverse than mastodon does to the wider general fediverse. if a server doesn't see a post, it doesn't know about it.
in mastodon, boosts expand the network. a@server1 follows b@server2 and b follows c@server3. b boosts c and because of that, server1 knows about the post.
bookwyrm users don't boost that much, so cross server enrichment doesn't happen much. if i look at a particular book, i won't get the benefit of reviews from server3 because few if any boost from server2. setver1 never sees them.
small bookwyrm servers are even more starved than small mastodon servers.
this might be mitigated through more following, but the directory service for finding other users is also affected by that starvation.
i regularly search for users and check active users with more than a couple posts for any overlap with my general reading proclivities. but i find little.
i logged in to my old bookwyrm.social account yesterday and compared directory results with sfba.club. dozens of users with hundreds of posts showed up under recent users. sfba.club is lucky to show anyone with more than a couple posts, because the stats reflect only what the server sees.
and i searched for the same accounts on both servers. sfba.club would show the same account with little/no activity that bookwyrm.social showed having dozens of recent posts.
either bookwyrm needs to incorporate more features for cross server exposure, or users need to boost more, or bookwyrm small instances will continue to be very very disconnected.