As a Douban user in voluntary exile, I am trying to find ways to track
my reading and TV series watching progress without going into too much
hassle.
Tried to use gopher, as you (soon cannot) see in the /wareli directory
in this gopher hole. But 2 days on it is already showing its problems:
another git repo to sync if I want to edit it on my working computer,
too much editing and manual formatting.
Need is the mother of all inventions. Today, as I was in a hurry (like
always), I tooted on a Mastodon instance about a book I want to read,
and I tagged it "to read" in Chinese. Then I realized this could make
a passable social/personal library manager and progress tracker.
In its simplest form, a toot can record my interest on a book, when I
start reading and when I finish. Just adding tags to the toots would
suffice.
A toot can also be a "node" toot. It can store links to the
publisher's page, Wikipedia, or reviews. If I want to add something
after I publish the toot, it is as simple as replying to it.
If someone else want to use the "node" toot, they just search for it
and boost it with their comments. It can be their own status tag, or a
"list" tag, for putting the book/movie/music etc. into their own
collections.
With Mastodon's API someone can even write a webhook or a CLI app to
automate all these actions. By that time we can confidently say
goodbye to Douban.
