BookWyrm is still a young piece of software, and isn't at the level of stability and feature-richness that you'd find in a production-ready application. But it does what it says on the box! If you'd like to join an instance, you can check out the [instances](https://joinbookwyrm.com/instances/) list.
BookWyrm is a platform for social reading! You can use it to track what you're reading, review books, and follow your friends. It isn't primarily meant for cataloguing or as a data-source for books, but it does do both of those things to some degree.
BookWyrm is built on [ActivityPub](http://activitypub.rocks/). With ActivityPub, it inter-operates with different instances of BookWyrm, and other ActivityPub compliant services, like Mastodon. This means you can run an instance for your book club, and still follow your friend who posts on a server devoted to 20th century Russian speculative fiction. It also means that your friend on mastodon can read and comment on a book review that you post on your BookWyrm instance.
Federation makes it possible to have small, self-determining communities, in contrast to the monolithic service you find on GoodReads or Twitter. An instance can be focused on a particular interest, be just for a group of friends, or anything else that brings people together. Each community can choose which other instances they want to federate with, and moderate and run their community autonomously. Check out https://runyourown.social/ to get a sense of the philosophy and logistics behind small, high-trust social networks.
Since the project is still in its early stages, the features are growing every day, and there is plenty of room for suggestions and ideas. Open an [issue](https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm/issues) to get the conversation going!
The application is set up to share book and author data between instances, and get book data from arbitrary outside sources. Right now, the only connector is to OpenLibrary, but other connectors could be written.
The [documentation website](https://docs.joinbookwyrm.com/) has instruction on how to set up Bookwyrm in a [developer environment](https://docs.joinbookwyrm.com/developer-environment.html) or [production](https://docs.joinbookwyrm.com/installing-in-production.html).
