Bye!, Jeff

I am not a person with much any attachment to new years’ resolutions and things of the sort. It is well known that there are many calendars, ours is just one of the many, so I feel that nowadays, most of the people give too much importance to this arbitrary division of time.

But one thing I still do every year comes January 1st, is to set my reading goal in Goodreads, for no particular reason than to keep me motivated, because seeing the goal completion percentage increasing throughout the year is, believe it or not, soothing. In the end, humans are not far from lab rats, seeking for dope after performing a task. And so, I wrote off 2024 as a disastrous reading year for many reasons that don’t belong here, and I set about going back to my normal reading pace and interests, I logged into the service and updated my reading challenge. Like any other year.

But it was just a few days later that The Orange Twat took office, and in a theatrical show of power, he decided to sit a bunch of oligarch tech bros in the front row of his inauguration (comically, ahead of his own aides). My partner, as most of the world, took notice of such, and upon commenting it, made the remark that it is outrageous for us to continue relying on the services these people use to become even more rich, specially for some services that are not necessarily critical. And so, two days after, my partner was out of Goodreads.

I know very well that there’s been an alternative out there for while (6 years, to be precise): The StoryGraph. By many standards it is better than Goodreads, even for its short life. The statistics, the flexibility on book tagging and cataloguing, its simplicity, the focus on tracking your reads, etc. I knew it from few years back, when I first tested, but somehow, similarly as it happens with the balkanization of IM protocols, I did not want to jump into another service and leave my friends behind. But this time, my partner’s words resonated stronger than before given the context we are in.

If there is anything, for small the gesture might be, the times are proving that we must do it. We must take every chance to send the message that we don’t want to be part of their machinery. Even if it is just taking our reading data away from a service. And hope that other people will do the same, after all, the effect of explaining (here or in person) why I am moving away from an Amazon-centric service is more important than any (non-existing) monetary loss that I might cause to Jeff.

And so, here it is my (for now public) profile in StoryGraph.

It was only after I did the switch, that I learned the person behind StoryGraph is Nadia Odunayo, a black woman who I think is also deeply involved in the software behind it, at least judging by the updates in the publicly available roadmap.

Thank you, Nadia, for your work 👏.