cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7938976
Wasn’t sure if this was the right comm, but wanted to warn my fellow selfhosters.
Tldr: Booklore is in all likelihood vibe coded slop based on the maintainer’s commit history.
Someone pointed this out on Reddit in the linked thread and provided examples of their other behavior toward contributors. Dev crashed out in Discord and started banning people, locking channels, saying forks are theft. Wild stuff.
If you’re running Booklore, I’d urge you to switch to something else before this turns out to be another Huntarr situation. There are good alternatives suggested in that thread, but likely none of them that will have all the features you want.
I use Calibre Web Automated (which I suspect is also vibe coded to an extent considering the amount of features that get thrown at the wall in each new release) + Shelfmark because I need Kobo Sync and embedding metadata to file. A lot of the other suggested apps can do one or the other, but not both. Audiobookshelf can embed metadata to file, but since it isn’t focused on ebooks, doesn’t do Kobo Sync. Komga has great Kobo Sync, but only embeds to a database.
So I’m opening the floor to see other people’s suggested setups for ebook storage and consumption also.
EDIT: The Booklore dev responded.
The said in their reply that they’ve been trying to maximize their Claude sub within the last 1.5 months, but they’ve been using it for a while. Which I know people are going to split hairs about “vibe-coded” vs. “ai-assisted”, but they admit that their pace has been unrealistic due to AI contributions. They did say they cancelled their subscription and are going to try to correct course. Up to you if you believe them. Booklore trajectory has never felt good to me when major bugs go multiple versions without being fixed, so I’ll still stay away.