Digital literary salon that fosters communities

The internet is still deprived of a good digital salon for literature. Goodreads is good (in the grand scheme), but it lacks that... intangible quality of community that makes you excited to constantly visit a site and interact with strangers. IMO, every "goodreads alternative" has failed due to the fact that they didn't have or capture any... community at all.

No one cares about what random strangers read or write. You care about what people you think have better taste than you read and want to read. We really have solid communities in reddit literary corners. These are my favorite communities in my life surrounding books, and I think we could really start something really, really special in this bleak new age of the internet. I really believe this community to can set a taste level and a perspective that organically grows from a strong community.

One bookshelf, where adding a book to your shelf indicates "Want to Read".

I don't really believe in the separation of "Read", "Want to Read", and "Current Reading" sections into three independent sections. I wanted to mimic a physical bookshelf, where only books you want to read end up on your shelf. There are toggle buttons to indicate if you've read or liked a book.

No "reading challenges", "how many pages you read this year", "reading progress" and other nonsense.

Self explanatory. Why are we bringing numbers into one aspect of our lives where we don't need to think about numbers. Why are we treating reading like statistics.

Personalization through distinct usernames, pfp, banners, etc

I think something that makes sites where you express strong opinions or perspective is even more fun with a lot of profile and user customizations. I purposely added profile pictures and banner images in bookshelves a prominent feature. I want to add even more, so if you have any good ideas, let me know! I also want to have badges for certain milestones so users can further distinguish themselves.

Discoverable users (and their shelves), reviews, and lists.

Have you ever made a Goodreads friend? No? Me neither. I wanted users to be able to discover each other, interact with each other, see what they read, like, etc. This social aspect is something that I wished existed in a site like Goodreads. Everything feels so lonely and hollow there. As we add more features, hopefully we can find even more clever ways to add social aspects to the site.

Rich Text Editor, Markdown supported

This was a big one for me. It had to be a rich text editor using markdown like Substack where you can add texture and formatting to make writing less bland and boring.

Suggest and complain on Discord

I made a discord so I can communicate with any user or fix bugs quickly. If you have any ideas, inputs, criticisms, please let me know. I trust the users more than myself, honestly.

Future ambitions

I want to support self-publishing and a marketplace for rare books (first editions, etc) and possibly photobooks. I personally own more photobooks than fiction/non-fiction, and would love to integrate that to the site, if it fits together well. But this is for the future. Just wanted to put it out there. Also more personalization. Perhaps giving users ability to pick colors of their profile (color of buttons & username, etc)