EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceSocial MediaHeadquarters: DE

BookWyrm: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

BookWyrm is a federated social network for readers. Users track what they are reading, set an annual reading goal, write reviews, discuss books and see what friends are reading. Recommendations come from people rather than algorithms. BookWyrm uses the ActivityPub protocol and therefore interoperates with software such as Mastodon and Pleroma. Each instance chooses which other instances it federates with. The software is built with Django and PostgreSQL and is maintained by a community around developer Mouse Reeve. Users join an existing instance or run their own, using Docker.

BookWyrm is not the product of a single vendor and has no fixed hosting location; each instance administrator decides where data is stored. The source code is under the Anti-Capitalist Software License, which restricts use to groups such as individuals, non-profits, educational institutions and worker-owned organisations, and is not a standard open-source licence. A commercial organisation should therefore first check whether self-hosting is permitted.

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Sovereignty score
71 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    EU-only hosting
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-360
    Key management with a European vendor
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
    Closed source: switching requires data migration
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-655
    Closed source, runtime with the vendor

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 9, 2026
Headquarters
DE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting
EUVerified by hand
Open-source
NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Hosting signal
DIGITALOCEAN-ASN - DigitalOcean, LLC, US (US)Technically measured
Category
Social Media
Type
Product
Website
bookwyrm.social ↗

The hosting signal shows the network that serves the vendor's website, often a CDN, and not necessarily where the service or your data is hosted. How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to BookWyrm

The European alternatives to BookWyrm come from our knowledge base of over 6,800 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

34 European Social Media vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with BookWyrm

BookWyrm is headquartered in DE and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data.

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so BookWyrm scores best on data residency.

BookWyrm is closed source and hosted by the vendor. The encryption keys and the runtime sit with the vendor and switching requires data migration. Ask about bring-your-own-key, export options and open standards.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs BookWyrm together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to BookWyrm?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to BookWyrm include Agorapulse, Akkoma and BeReal. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to BookWyrm?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to BookWyrm include Akkoma, Diaspora and Friendica. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is BookWyrm GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

BookWyrm is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. That makes BookWyrm an EU-sovereign choice in its own right; the EU alternatives on this page are comparable European tools.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 9, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Digital sovereignty in Social Media

Social Media: Social networks — posts, media, communities. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

Also in this category

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8 European alternatives to BookWyrm — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score