BookWyrm Documentation

How to Use and Contribute

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.

Features

Since the project is still in its early stages, the features are growing every day, and there is plenty of room for suggestions and ideas. Open an issue to get the conversation going!

  • Posting about books
    • Compose reviews, with or without ratings, which are aggregated in the book page
    • Compose other kinds of statuses about books, such as:
      • Comments on a book
      • Quotes or excerpts
    • Reply to statuses
    • View aggregate reviews of a book across connected BookWyrm instances
    • Differentiate local and federated reviews and rating in your activity feed
  • Track reading activity
    • Shelve books on default "to-read," "currently reading," and "read" shelves
    • Create custom shelves
    • Store started reading/finished reading dates, as well as progress updates along the way
    • Update followers about reading activity (optionally, and with granular privacy controls)
    • Create lists of books which can be open to submissions from anyone, curated, or only edited by the creator
  • Federation with ActivityPub
    • Broadcast and receive user statuses and activity
    • Share book data between instances to create a networked database of metadata
    • Identify shared books across instances and aggregate related content
    • Follow and interact with users across BookWyrm instances
    • Inter-operate with non-BookWyrm ActivityPub services (currently, Mastodon is supported)
  • Granular privacy controls
    • Private, followers-only, and public privacy levels for posting, shelves, and lists
    • Option for users to manually approve followers
    • Allow blocking and flagging for moderation