I’m back to using Goodreads but I lost my friends list, if you use Goodreads please add me as a friend.

After Goodreads lost my account I was furious and of course intended to never use it again. But to their credit, Goodreads did some extra work and managed to get me a copy of all my lost review data that I could import. And in the meantime I’d come to really miss Goodreads and decided I’d prefer to go back to using it.

After my experience I got interested in the IndieWeb idea of POSSE, Publish on your Own Site. You publish content like short updates or book reviews on your own infrastructure, then syndicate it to Twitter or Goodreads as appropriate. I like the spirit of owning your own data. But it requires you have your own infrastructure to publish to. I set up a basic Hugo blog for book reviews but it just doesn’t cut it. Goodreads offers so much more. Reviews are published in the context of a database of books, quickly crosslinked by author and genre and with publishing data and covers. Also Goodreads is social, reviews are shared with friends. That second part is why I didn’t switch to The StoryGraph; it’s a promising product but the community is small.

Still I’ve learned a hard lesson; your data isn’t safe on any cloud service. Making backups of your data is a good idea, I now have data dumps from 15 services. Although you still need a product to make that data useful. I’m still curious how Goodreads lost my data, they haven’t told me. One thing this whole debacle got me thinking is how dangerous account deletion is.