BookWyrm

BookWyrm is a federated, self-hostable social network for readers. It mirrors the core experience of Goodreads — book shelves, ratings, reviews, reading status, and following other readers — but lives on the open web via the ActivityPub protocol, the same standard that powers Mastodon and the Fediverse. A single BookWyrm instance can talk to any other BookWyrm instance, and users can follow readers across servers, all without a central Amazon-owned database of your reading habits.

The project is built with Python and Django on a Postgres backend, and is designed to be run by individuals, libraries, indie bookstores, or reading communities. It pulls metadata from OpenLibrary, supports importing your existing Goodreads shelves, and ships with features for book clubs, reading challenges, and content warnings. The codebase is open source and the community runs dozens of public instances you can join if you do not want to host your own.

Compared to Goodreads, BookWyrm puts you in control of your data and the recommendations you see, with no ads and no algorithmic timeline. Compared to StoryGraph, it offers a stronger social layer and a federated model similar to email: one account, many servers, no single point of failure.