When I tried Bookwirm (a while ago), it didn't look like there was any kind of metadata sharing between instances. Each book was present on each library, thus destroying the user experience (per-instance ratings and reviews for a single book).
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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This shouldn't be the case. While books appear to be present on each library (=instance), reviews etc federate between them! They refer to each other.
Here is an example for a famous book on two random instances:
- https://ramblingreaders.org/book/116065/s/project-hail-mary (7 reviews)
- https://ramblingreaders.org/book/116071/s/project-hail-mary (14 reviews)
- https://ramblingreaders.org/book/94232/s/project-hail-mary (37 reviews)
- https://bookwyrm.social/book/102060/s/project-hail-mary (686 reviews)
- https://bookwyrm.social/book/733316/s/project-hail-mary (3 reviews)
- https://bookwyrm.social/book/1018730/s/project-hail-mary (9 reviews)
- https://bookwyrm.social/book/215201/s/project-hail-mary (24 reviews)
I can find the 686 reviews entry on both, but not the others. And still, these all refer to the same book...
While they refer to the same book they are not the same editions of this book. Some are hardcover, some are paperback, some are later editions and only some of them are actual duplicates of the same book (just have a look at the different ISBNs).
Sharing the reviews between these different editions might seem logical for some cases, but a reader might also review the actual quality of a specific edition (poor print quality, cheap paper, etc.). Even the contents of books (mostly in scientific literature) may be vastly different between two editions. So sharing the reviews is a dangerous thing to do.
So in your case this is not due to a lack of federation but because these are actually different books and in a few cases duplicates of the same book (someone didn't check if the book existed in the first place or was unhappy on how it was represented).
I wanted to contribute a while back and found a bunch of duplicate authors. Unfortunately there wasn't any way to merge them and the relevant issue has been open for years.
Well, at least it hasn't been autoclosed I guess 😅
This made me chuckle because of some of the truth in it:
What universities actually do, however, is publish papers nobody reads in journals nobody can afford, in order to make their numbers go up in ranking systems nobody understands, so they can attract research funding and student enrollments so they can pay people to publish more academic papers.
Yes and some number of those students leave the university with new ideas and connections. Maybe some of their papers were an exercise to focus their expertise? Not saying universities are the only place that one can find new ideas and connections with the world either.