Instead of handing your reading history to a retail platform and letting an algorithm decide what you read next, BookWyrm lets a self-hosted community of readers make the recommendations. Shelve every book as to-read, currently reading, stopped, or finished, record start and finish dates with progress updates along the way, and set an annual reading goal to keep the habit honest. Rate and review finished books, drop a comment while you are mid-chapter, or save a quotation worth keeping, and all of it can appear on the book page alongside reviews aggregated from other connected instances. Follow friends to see their shelves fill up, join a group to build a shared reading list, or create your own list and choose whether it stays closed, accepts suggestions for approval, opens to everyone, or belongs to the group. Posts, shelves, and lists each carry their own privacy level, public, unlisted, followers-only, or private, and you can approve followers by hand before they see anything. Because instances federate over ActivityPub, your readers can follow you from another BookWyrm community or straight from Mastodon, and book metadata is shared between servers so small instances do not catalog alone. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Anti-Capitalist Software License licensed.