Tracking my book reading online

I tend to spend a lot of time reading. When I was a kid it was as many books I could carry home from the library; later it would become newspapers, blogs and online things.

I never bothered to track what I was reading, because there was so much of it and re-reading something you enjoyed isn't that bad. It also felt invasive (in a privacy sense), but that was mostly because everyone was using the Amazon-owned Goodreads. For a while I used the perfectly named "Badreads" app, but I never felt comfortable with it.

Anyways, this is all to say that I now have an account on bookrastinating.com (also perfectly named!!), which runs the ActivityPub-enabled BookWyrm software.

You can follow me as: @legoktm@bookrastinating.com. I've been posting everything as followers-only, and I'm planning to only approve people I know well (my current vague criteria is that we've met in real life). The actual federation from Mastodon is pretty meh, you can see when I add books to my "to read" list and when I start and finish books, but can't read the actual reviews I've been writing. I'm curious to see if it's better for people who are federating from other BookWyrm instances. If I end up writing something brilliant that I want public I'll probably publish it on my blog.

In any case, I'm fine with those limitations for now, this is largely an exercise in tracking what I read rather than trying to be uh, social about what I read. I appreciate that BookWyrm seems to have some actual privacy controls in place instead of Mastodon's "everything is public".