With today’s news of Letterboxd being acquired by an investment company, I got to wondering if I should start weaning my movie obsession off of there and onto something more open before the inevitable enshittification begins. I did a cursory search and found nothing promising, but figured the braintrust here might know something I don’t!
The suggestion of a Fediverse IMDb/Trakt/letterboxd comes up about once a month on here. This is my last comment on it and you can follow the links back to previous discussions but to summarise:
- The idea has been floating around for a few years now but has, so far failed to get traction.
- The developers of BookWyrm reckon that it would be easy enough to fork their software for other uses (Discogs comes up quite a bit too) but they don’t have the time to do it.
- It seems like the best approach, the one that would avoid reinventing the wheel each time, is one that creates a generic system (GeneralWyrm) that could then more easily be modified for other uses -
FilmWyrmedit: ScreenWyrm (as it should combine TV and film), Disclaim, ComicsWyrm (I still miss comicbookdb), ActionFigureWyrm, etc.
I’m still enthusiastic about it as I want to move my stuff off IMDb (lists, ratings, etc) but the only viable home is really Trakt at the moment and who knows when that will get bought up and I have to move again. A better option would be to wait for a Fediverse alternative and make that my ultimate home. Perhaps this time around the project will get the momentum it needs. 🤞🤞
Features on top of the standard add, review and rate films that I’d like to see:
- ability to import lists from IMDb and Trakt (Trakt allows you to import from IMDb so they are presumably compatible).
- integration with Kodi and Jellyfin to help you keep a track of what you have watched (Trakt currently integrates with Kodi very nicely so it would seem straightforward to use something similar).
Do we know if the BookWyrm source code is of a good quality? I know developers always prefer starting from scratch, but sometimes it is actually the best idea.
I suppose everyone’s definition of good quality code differs but you have a point about starting from scratch and if the idea was to create a more general/modular then it might make sense.
All I can say is take a look, they’ve had to solve a lot of problems most variations would also need to solve but, even starting from scratch, the solutions could be brought over.
I had a shufti at the codebase, but I’m not enough of a Python dev to have an opinion.
I’m currently still planning on getting a Letterboxd sub on Black Friday, but I’d love for there to be a good open-source alternative - just not enough to code in Python to help make it happen! One is on my to-do list, but it’s already several lifetimes long…
Yes, I don’t know enough Python to be able to take it on but I keep an eye open for these kinds of threads and throw in some context in the hope that this time it might get enough traction.
oh ffs, I’d only just found out about letterboxd and now it’s just a matter of time until it’s ruined by greed.
edit: Having researched the buyers (Canadian investment firm Tiny), I’m a little more hopeful that it won’t be ruined. We should definitely be thinking about a fediverse option though.
