this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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According to the official Discord, "ACX has made the decision to close Booklore and step away." Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project.

For those not in the loop, Booklore was an app for selfhosting book libraries. It had a nice UI. It was able to store metadata separately from the download files, so you could have an organized library without duplication. In recent weeks, there have been conflicts about AI code, licensing, and general Discord nastiness.

RIP

Edit: The discord, website and github are all gone. I found a copy of the announcement:

AnnouncementπŸ“’ A note on where things stand

ACX has made the decision to close BookLore and step away. He has a partner, a new chapter of his life ahead of him, and honestly - building something that reached 10k stars and thousands of daily users is something to be proud of. We wish him well.

That said - this community, and this project, is bigger than any one person. That's the whole point of open source.

So here's what's happening next:

A group of the original contributors - the people who built a lot of what you've been using - are continuing the work under a new name. [PROJECT NAME TBD] is that continuation. Same mission. Better foundation. Governed the way an open source project should be: transparently, collaboratively, and with the community at the center.

We're not starting from zero. We're starting from everything this community has already built together.

If you want to be part of what comes next, come join us: πŸ‘‰ https://discord.gg/FwqHeFWk

More details - name, repo, roadmap - coming very shortly. Thank you for your patience, and thank you for giving a damn about this project. That's exactly why it's worth continuing.

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[–] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 136 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

As far as I followed this whole ordeal, his use of ai was maybe 20% of what went wrong with this project. Open contempt for FOSS principles and his contributors, a unilateral (and probably illegal) change in license, Discord censorship, API gatekeeping and disingenuous monetization, along with a general dishonest communicationwere probably more of a nail in this coffin then the use of ai code assistance

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 8 points 13 hours ago

Wasn't the vim maintainer similar dismissive of the community for like a decade before neovim forked and rewrite the entire plugin layer and async layer?

Even with problems things could have improved.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech -3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (3 children)

I'm unaware of these, but I'll take you at your word. I still say even if the guy is an asshole, we still lost someone who was contributing. If he is picking up his toys and going home, we still lost a developer. I wasn't there for those issues so I don't know how they were handled.

I'll compare it to Lemmy. Lemmy devs are (sorry guys) I'll say.. Disagreeable. They are headstrong and definitely have their own opinions which I have different opinions are about. I don't think we would be friends. However, look at what they built, and the communities we've built thanks to their work. They started all of this, and now we have mbin and piefed and others thanks to what they started, even if don't like how they handle things. We should always remember that the people contribute, and that's more than the vast majority of us.

(Not directed only at you commenter, but everyone else reading this to share my point of view)

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 30 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

You may need to go catch up on this. The "dev" in this case caused more issues than they solved.

One can't be missed if one didn't contribute to anything in the first place.

Who are we missing, Claude?

[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago

It seems to me that having an asshole that contributes is a shitty situation, but each to their own.

(hehe poo joke but the point stands)

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 5 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

I still say even if the guy is an asshole, we still lost someone who was contributing.

I use tt-rss. Tho I've never interacted with the dev personally, from what I can tell, he is kind of a hard headed, asshole. Still a great piece of software tho. Him being an alleged asshole doesn't deter me.

[–] anyhow2503@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

You don't really need to care about that from a consumer perspective. Unfortunately however, this is a common weakness of FOSS projects. If the maintainer is an asshole, the project suffers and eventually dies most of the time. Being an asshole is not conducive towards attracting contributors. Who knew?

[–] kevinwells@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago

FYI, the original developer of tt-rss stopped maintaining it last year, and a fork has taken its place: https://github.com/tt-rss/tt-rss#some-notes-about-this-project.

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 2 points 12 hours ago

It would if he was dumping huge portions of AI generated code into it the repository faster than people could reasonably review it.