literature.cafe chat

I've never used one but it struck me as odd that people would use a seperate device for smth so easily done on your phone.

Is there smth special about the hardware? Is it better somehow?

cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/2905115

Hi! Does anybody know of any online book clubs for banned books?

Or does anybody wanna…start one?

I’m looking a comfy group to join that doesn’t cost money or conflict with my busy schedule of being sick all the time.

(if this isn’t the right community to post this is, let me know)

👀

I can do a 13 days of horror books highlighting some horror books in !fiction@literature.cafe if there's any interest in that. It seems that making highlight posts made a lot of people engaged and started a lot of conversations. Thoughts? I'm willing to do like daily to weekly themed book highlights. I can even do nonfiction book highlights as well. I have a shit ton of books I know of.

Help! I'm looking for interesting microbloggers who focus on the literature space (especially speculative fiction) to follow. Preferably on mastodon since I can consume the rss feed of their content.

Nanowrimo is in November so I’ll make the community in prep to rally people on lemmy who might be interested in it

I read a bit more of the Seven Moons of Maali Almeida and it's really good so far.

Do you use Goodreads or something similar like Fantastic Fiction?

I found an account dedicated to spam posting "enlightened centrist" talking points and pundits. Their name itself is part of the advertising. They even would post the same content across multiple communities, without cross-posting. And not just political stuff, they posted the same meme about 4 times without linking them.

I know this sort of thing happened all the time on Reddit and essentially it was hopeless because of how the corporate power structure worked.

"Politics" and "News" communities seem especially "apolitical" (that is to say Neoliberal) and hands-off "free speech to the end user" about what is posted. I'll frequently see a lame article, sensationalist headline, instead of the first source or the most informative one. Or I'll see a great thread about a great news story - and someone reposts the same content the next day with better timing, and it will be weaker journalism with weaker comments - yet more people will see it. Now this doesn't constitute abuse, but it will be just as permissive of abuse of the system as Reddit was.

I've also seen threads asking about where to find good sources, how to find accurate journalism... without much great advice. It's sort of an acquired skill, but we have the potential to help people acquire it.

In another conversation about the server literature.cafe potentially defederating from the Hexbear server, I found this comment chain by @Janvier to be a worthwhile read. He makes the case for smaller servers to defederate from many large servers, and not only Hexbear, as a way for smaller communities to grow organically. It is an interesting and different vision of Lemmy; many smaller ‘islands’ that are only marginally connected, instead of one big platform that is tightly connected between the different servers.