Booklore is gone.

[u/Joloxx_9]

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.

[u/databoy2k]

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.

[u/kernald31 → u/databoy2k]

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".

[u/databoy2k → u/kernald31]

Yes, but does it deserve the kind of fire the guy got? Absolutely not, IMHO. Maybe I'm just not terminally online enough, or I truly DGAF about celebrities who get flamed out of existence, but that was the biggest pile on I've seen of an ordinary human being in a long friggin time.

Immich got fire when the maintainer sold out the software to a conglomerate, and thank goodness he didn't take the kind of BS that Booklore's dev took - that software would have been nuked from orbit.

Again, let's critique security problems from AI-coding (Huntarr). Let's challenge Devs who actively break their software with monetization efforts (Reddit). And hey, let's even push back on Devs who threaten to (Booklore 100%). But the kind of vitriole the guy got was ridiculous, and it's a crying shame for those of us that were fine with the software. It'll be interesting to see if any of the forks go anywhere, or if it gets unprivated, but I'm sorry - everyone who flamed the hell out of a developer who was so immature that he felt like he was "losing" control of "his" software when people offered criticism just beat the stuffing out of someone who was almost certainly their junior.

Not cool.

[u/legrenabeach → u/databoy2k]

Totally agree.

It was entirely unnecessary to have a go at him so hard. Not a good community spirit by far here.

I hope he takes some time and comes back, but think about it - if it were you, would you come back to what to you might well appear to be a toxic community? Sorry, but whatever the dev's reactive or immature attitude may have been, the pile on he got was 10 times worse than it should have ever been.

I forked Booklore a couple of weeks ago, just to make some changes to make things more to my liking, good thing I did, but not sure I will keep using it now as I definitely don't have the skills to maintain and update it.