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.

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[–] davel@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 month ago

christ i should just pin all my packages to the last pre-vibe era release for the rest of my life

[–] digdilem@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Whilst I love a foss drama as much as the next person; It's clear the dev here has shown /some/ humility and self awareness after the fact.

And whilst it doesn't change his actions, and if it's true, receiving death threats from people is completely unacceptable. I hope he has reported those to the police and that they are traced and appropriate action taken. (here in the UK, making a death threat over the internet would get you jailed for up to ten years). Being abusive is cowardly, unneccesary and shameful.

[–] Inui@hexbear.net 1 points 1 month ago

Of course. Not encouraging that kind of abuse. More just suggesting people not use the project at this stage. If things change and the dev chills out, maybe it'll be good to pick up later. Calibre Web and it's jank database system needs better competition that is focused on Ebooks and not audio/comics/manga.

[–] renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Wow that's a long dev reply. He certainly has a lot of controversies to address...

Steering clear of this one.

[–] decended_being@midwest.social 1 points 1 month ago

Most of his replies are written by genAI. Some he forgot to remove the paraphrased prompt. They start with something like.

Sure, how is this for an apology.

[–] Provolone@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Do we know how far back this goes? Couldn't find much skimming that Reddit thread.

I'm still on 0.35.0 so maybe I lucked out.

[–] Inui@hexbear.net 2 points 1 month ago

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.