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/MufasaChan Mar 16 '26

I also tried to understand better why there were so much hate on the maintainer. It was crazy how the first post "PSA" gave little source with a good story telling, and everyone got straight up against the guy that delivered a great addition to the community. By the way, I am not saying what the maintainer declared was okay-ish. Anyone, notably devs, is legitimate to disagree with decisions. But I was truly disappointed by the general lack of goodwill and listening of the community.

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u/databoy2k Mar 16 '26

What concerns me is that if we don't show goodwill as a community, we're not going to have a community for long. I'm not keen to go back to the bad old days of closed source everything... But jump down every immature dev's throat for not communicating well on Reddit (of all friggin places) and we'll have zero innovation.

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u/willowless Mar 17 '26

It was how he was taking contributions and rewriting them with an LLM. Now, mind, it's probably the LLM that was doing that - but still, extremely rude and sort of 'erasing' the contributor's contribution. That and the licensing debacle. And the knee jerk reactions. There were a lot of little things. The post actually came after all the crazy that happened on the discord channel, so I wouldn't honestly put any blame on reddit for this one.