BookWyrm

Welcome to the codebase!

BookWyrm is a social network for tracking your reading, talking about books, writing reviews, and discovering what to read next. Federation allows BookWyrm users to join small, trusted communities that can connect with one another, and with other ActivityPub services like Mastodon and Pleroma.

👋 Meaningful human interaction is the whole point: please feel welcome to participate regardless of your experience level with programming. We would love to help! By the same token, please do not submit any AI-generated code or content.

About BookWyrm

BookWyrm is a platform for social reading. You can use it to track what you're reading, review books, and follow your friends. It isn't primarily meant for cataloguing or as a data-source for books, but it does do both of those things to some degree.

Federation

BookWyrm is built on ActivityPub. With ActivityPub, it inter-operates with different instances of BookWyrm, and other ActivityPub compliant services, like Mastodon. This means you can run an instance for your book club, and still follow your friend who posts on a server devoted to 20th century Russian speculative fiction. It also means that your friend on mastodon can read and comment on a book review that you post on your BookWyrm instance.

Federation makes it possible to have small, self-determining communities, in contrast to the monolithic service you find on GoodReads or Twitter. An instance can be focused on a particular interest, be just for a group of friends, or anything else that brings people together. Each community can choose which other instances they want to federate with, and moderate and run their community autonomously. Check out runyourown.social to get a sense of the philosophy and logistics behind small, high-trust social networks.

Developers of other ActivityPub software can find out more about BookWyrm's implementation at FEDERATION.md.

Features

Post about books

Compose reviews, comment on what you're reading, and post quotes from books. You can converse with other BookWyrm users across the network about what they're reading.

Track reading activity

Keep track of what books you've read, and what books you'd like to read in the future.

Federation with ActivityPub

Federation allows you to interact with users on other instances and services, and also shares metadata about books and authors, which collaboratively builds a decentralized database of books.

Privacy and moderation

Users and administrators can control who can see their posts and what other instances to federate with.

Tech Stack

Web backend

Django web server
PostgreSQL database
ActivityPub federation
Celery task queuing
Redis task backend
Redis (again) activity stream manager

Front end

Django templates
Bulma.io CSS framework
Vanilla JavaScript, in moderation

Deployment

Docker and docker-compose
Gunicorn web runner
Flower celery monitoring
Nginx HTTP server

Set up BookWyrm

The documentation website has instruction on how to set up BookWyrm in a developer environment or production.

Contributing

There are many ways you can contribute to the success and health of the BookWyrm project! You do not have to know how to write code and we are always keen to see more people get involved. Find out how you can join the project at CONTRIBUTING.md.