Inventaire is a libre social network for listing and sharing books (Social Core) on top of an open bibliographic database that extends Wikidata (Entities Core). Until recently both cores ran on one central instance, inventaire.io.

Federated entities mode lets you run your own social instance while reusing entities from another. The split turns Inventaire into two coupled but distinct projects — own codebases, domain names, and identities — so the social layer can federate with less complexity and the entities core can be reused beyond bibliographic data. Code and wiki: codeberg.org/inventaire/inventaire, wiki.inventaire.io.

Book catalogues and “what I am reading” graphs usually live on Goodreads or retailer accounts: the social graph and the bibliographic data are one company's product. Inventaire already offers a FLOSS alternative; keeping both cores on a single central instance reintroduces a bottleneck. Splitting them is the step from a friendly central site to infrastructure others can host and remix.