An Online Book Club Across Our Own Websites

I want to start an online book club, but I do not want the books, reviews, and conversations to disappear into another company's feed. People already write about what they are reading on their own websites, and I would rather connect those independent places than ask everyone to move into one more platform. Personal websites give us durable URLs, control over our own writing, and the freedom to organize our thoughts however we want. The challenge is not where to publish the writing, because the open web already solved that problem a long time ago. The interesting problem is how we discover one another once those conversations are spread across many different sites.

Octothorpes gives us an interesting way to experiment with that discovery problem. An Octothorpe Protocol server can index the tags and relationships that participating websites choose to expose, while the original writing remains on the website where it was published. That does introduce some centralized infrastructure, and I do not want to pretend otherwise, because most of us currently depend on the same Octothorpes service to discover those relationships. The protocol is designed to support multiple servers, though, so the index does not necessarily have to become a permanent single point of control. I like that distinction because the shared service helps us find one another without requiring our writing itself to live there.

I am starting my part of the experiment with the tag online-book-club. My reading shelf will be the first collection of pages from my site participating in the club, and my /topics/online-book-club/ page will continue to collect my own contributions locally. If Octothorpes disappeared tomorrow, those pages would still exist at the same URLs on my website, and anyone else's writing would still exist on theirs. We might temporarily lose one of the ways we discover the connections between those pages, but we would not lose the writing, identity, or history of the people participating. That feels much healthier to me than building the entire community inside a service that owns both the conversation and the place where it lives.

I also do not want this to become another book club that requires membership, synchronized reading schedules, or somebody constantly organizing it. You can write about whatever book you happen to be reading, whether you finished it yesterday or have been thinking about it for twenty years, and publish those thoughts on your own website. If you want to participate, add online-book-club so other sites using the same graph have a chance to discover what you wrote. We do not even need to agree about the books, because disagreement and different perspectives are part of what makes reading other people's thoughts interesting. The shared tag is simply a thread connecting our shelves without requiring all of those shelves to be moved into the same room.

This is the kind of social web I want to spend more time building and participating in. I want people publishing on websites they control, linking generously to one another, and using shared protocols where they help us discover connections without surrendering ownership of what we create. There will still be infrastructure in the middle, and some of it will inevitably be more centralized than I would prefer, but the important part can remain at the edges with the people doing the writing. If a better index or another Octothorpe server appears later, the underlying pages do not have to move anywhere for us to use it. Publish something honest about a book you are reading, keep it somewhere you control, and give the rest of us a way to find it.