Comment by ☯️ dragfyre
yes, that's why i mentioned it there hehe. making anything fedi-compliant isn't easy - i should know, i was working on a fedi project that (unfortunately) never went very far beyond the design stage. it's nice that u/dimkr has at least blazed a trail to bring fediverse connectivity into geminispace - at least those who are interested in similar projects have somewhere to look to find out what's possible and what to watch out for.
i still have some connections in the Fediverse dev communities, including Bookwyrm's, so there's more networking that could happen there.
2025-07-17 · 10 months ago
11 Later Comments ↓
Python not being my forte, might look at a proxy. Or ground up. Currently adding Gemini to a fork of podgrab and somewhat regretting not starting from scratch. Though dual hosting in a single app does simplify some things. It’s that, a proxy or a Gemini first approach like tootik
☯️ dragfyre [OP] · 2025-07-17 at 06:11:
@sbr hmmm, now you're really making me want to check with the Bookwyrm people to see if anyone's ever thought of adding Gemini support
looked at the stack and its rather involved. nginx, Redis, pg, flower, not super self hosting friendly. Also I don’t think you get aggregated reviews, rather individual messages that are formatted as a review. Not a deal breaker but not exactly my cup of tea.
😈 dimkr · 2025-07-17 at 10:08:
I don't use it but if its modus operandi can be summarized in one sentence maybe I can implement it as a tootik feature, like communities (a poor man's Lemmy clone basically, minimal amount of code)
☯️ dragfyre [OP] · 2025-07-17 at 10:18:
@dimkr well it's a little bit more involved than something like tootik, as the point is to make a list of books that you want to read and let you mark them off, rate them and leave reviews about them as you read them. the reviews do federate over to Mastodon and appear as a feed, but the rest (the list, the ratings, and the read/unread state) don't - so the data model would be different.
It's all Python, and the code is hosted on Github:
— https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm/
💎 pista · 2025-07-17 at 13:05:
If you can code a very simple gemini client with certs (or use any of the already made ones) it’s trivial to make a command line app that will automatically post content to your tootik feed. And tootik handles the federation.
Your side of the job would be to write your list management app and review system. When a review is written and submitted, the backend grabs it and fires it to your tootik instance with the supplied cert. From there it goes everywhere.
I did something similar to have git updates automatically posted to the Fediverse。
You essentially just use the book review as the query string to tootik’s post url, and tootik handles it as a new post instead of promoting you for input.
☯️ dragfyre [OP] · 2025-07-17 at 14:35:
ah but would it federate with Bookwyrm 🤔 there's the rub. that's where all the extra book-related content would come from, not from tootik or mastodon.
😈 dimkr · 2025-07-17 at 17:03:
@pista You can definitely use tootik's UI as a Gemini-based "REST API" and implement a bot that publishes to fedi. This can be a good way to bring content to Gemini, even when federation is not a requirement.
👾 jecxjo · 2025-07-17 at 20:56:
I think the linchpin is how we would handle credentials. User/Password doesn't work in Gemini space and self created certs is a PITA to make some sort of binding service on the HTTP side.
🚀 clseibold [🛂] · 2025-07-18 at 15:10:
Just chiming in to say that the entire point of the idea was that you can look at book information (description, publisher, release date, title, # of pages) from Gemini. And then you post reviews for it if you want. But creating a cli app where all the book information is local doesn't make any of the book information available in Gemini.
I don't care about federation as much as other people in this thread, but it's certainly a nice feature. It's just not trivial.
But if you are not going to expose book information to Gemini, then there's no point in making the dang app. Like, that's the ENTIRE point of using Goodreads - to view and explore books you might want to read.
A capsule that doesn't expose book information to Gemini, an app that's only book reviews, does not interest me, so I will never use it, personally. And that's because you can't expect me to look at JUST reviews to explore books I might want to read, lmao.
You also need the book information, or at least some identifier of a book, stored on the server to group reviews about the same book. So like, it's not just bad user interface to exclude this, it's impractical.
🐙 norayr · 2025-08-02 at 01:46:
i am thinking to install tootik at least just for the lists feature:
lemmy is too big/complex/rust/and i never managed to build it
guppe is python
tootik is go!
and people from mastodon etc can comment and i guess open discussions on the lists.
Original Post
— bbs.geminispace.org/u/clseibold/29821
"Goodreads for Gemini" — Inspired by a comment in u/clseibold's thread: Here's a free idea for an enterprising developer with way too much time on their hands: Make Bookwyrm for Gemini. Bookwyrm is a federated (i.e. connected to the Fediverse) alternative to Goodreads that lets you build reading lists and write reviews for books. Making something like this would not only fit nicely with the overall Gemini...
💬 13 comments · 4 likes · 2025-07-17 · 10 months ago · #Fediverse