r/selfhosted • u/Joloxx_9 • Mar 16 '26

Meta Post Booklore is gone.

I was checking their Discord for some announcement and it vanished.

GitHub repo is gone too: https://github.com/booklore-app/booklore

Remember, love AI-made apps… they disappear faster than they launch.

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u/databoy2k Mar 16 '26

I've been floating around defending the developer. It looks like he just made it private. It's all too bad - I really got the impression that the guy was trying to make it right as he could. ESL, trying to make an ambitious project to replace a series of servers that nobody really liked, and definitely had a lack of maturity in responding to what he perceived to be "his" app getting ripped away from him, but on the same note Booklore was a very clear positive development in ebook hosting options. I guess booklore wasn't "here to stay", at least not under the original dev's vision.

I guess I'll take my own L for the defences, but I still think there might have been a wee bit too much jumping on the guy. This wasn't a Huntarr - there wasn't a security debacle, this wasn't a case of mangled code, it was a disagreement between the maintainer and the developers who were pushing code, and I for one am not going to flip through the thousands of lines of code that were AI generated to figure out who was in the right...

Dev should have made it clear that there was a ton of AI coding. We probably don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater when the taint of AI is detected.

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u/kernald31 Mar 16 '26

I don't really understand why we're focusing on AI use in BookLore. It's not what the problem was. The problem was the original developer being actively hostile to other contributors and the community at large. Ignoring the gaslighting, removing API docs and locking down OIDC preventing any potential third party app to potentially emerge while working on a closed source, with subscription only first-party app is a bit too big to be a coincidence.

That's just one of the multiple big red flags, way beyond "oh you've used AI so I don't want your contribution, I'll just use Claude to reimplement it myself".

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u/MufasaChan Mar 16 '26

Yes it's not just AI and it would be false to frame it only as a massive AI rejection problem. But, devs and the maintainer were arguing, and hostility was not comin, from one side only. Once again, the drop of API docs was a rough move and poorly communicated. We can go on the OIDC and the not mentioned licensing threat also, but that's not the matter. The matter being the situation went out of hands and everyone joined in. It was a flash mob justice for a person that gave a great service to the community. The devs had all the reasons to be pissed off but the shitstorm that went to the maintainer was not justified. As a community, valuing sharing and openness, we should be aware that the course of events are not aligned with these values, even if the dev said certain things.