It's like if you had a Goodreads account and a Twitter account, and your friends on Twitter could follow your Goodreads account too without them having to sign up to Goodreads themselves.
A sometimes annoying design choice of the Fediverse is that it isn't great at facilitating a singular identity across platforms. There's no easy way to have your Mastodon account linked to your Bookwyrm account in a way that says "Hey, this is the same person".
Instead, the focus is on making sure that you don't need to make a hundred accounts on different types of servers to do basic things like following, commenting, and ⭐ing stuff. So, if you really like @/alice@/bookwyrm.example then you can follow them and see when they post new reviews on your feed. You can ⭐ a particularly funny review they made to notify them that you like it. You can boost that review so your friends will see it. You can do all of that from your Mastodon account without creating a Bookwyrm account at all. You would only need a Bookwyrm account to post your own reviews of books or that kind of thing.
Bear in mind, most "account linking" nowadays is based on centralised services like Facebook, Apple etc, which is precisely what the Fediverse is trying to avoid. Centralised services lead to scenarios like the Musk meltdown, Facebook/Meta's abuses of power, privacy violations etc.
If there's a way to do this without centralised services that would be great.
From what I understand, it's not actually linking your accounts, but copying over data from your Mastodon account to your Pixelfed one? There is some discussion here:
Also, on the general subject of linking accounts, becoming dependent on your original account can cause problems if your original server goes down. With fully independent accounts, one server going down doesn't stop you using your accounts on other servers.
@feditips@runarcn@o76923@bookwyrm@EllieK We do link accounts in the OAuth sense, so you can easily log-in via Mastodon after the initial sign-up, but when it comes to using your Mastodon account as a Pixelfed account, we don't support that yet.
We are working on OIDC and IndieAuth support, which will enable that (so long as Mastodon supports that too)
I signed up to a BookWyrm server but found it had a short character limit (my Mastodon server allows 5,000 not 500 characters). This to me is crucial information - I'm interested in reading and writing reviews and discussion that's a bit more extensive than 500 characters.
How do I find character limit info for the servers?
-Book url isn't searchable, so can't add a review below.
-Can boost existing reviews: but just the cover, stars & heading; no body text.
-Presumably replies to reviews work? I can't see replies on BW sites (not logged in), only an icon to add one. Even if I click a review's date to view in isolation.
-Can follow users: feed of cover art (started, finished, rated) clutter. Plus comments & quotes, w/ text.
It's a social reading platform, so it is mainly about readers sharing their thoughts.
If you're looking for a writing community there's a Mastodon server at https://writing.exchange for example, or you could follow a writer's group such as @ authorindiespeak @ a.gup.pe (remove the spaces to make the address work, I don't want to spam the group with this post so I inserted spaces.)
@feditips
I just wondered if authors can have a profile too, like on Goodreads. As far as I know, that's still the only reading platform that does that. @bookwyrm
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