Building a small social network for book lovers

I've been thinking about building a "small" social network around books. The current de facto social network built around books is Goodreads, its features and UX are pretty brittle and hard to use. I've been thinking about building this as I would like to use the tool, tracking books and finding books should be easy.

I'm currently in the process of figuring out how to build it all myself, I'm lost on just how much work I should put into the tech stack and how much of it I should get from PaaS ecosystems like AWS, DigitalOcean, or others.

By "small" social network, I mean this network will not be aimed at mining users' data or trying to build an algorithm around engagement. The "social" aspect will be reminiscent of early Twitter days where you saw the feed as it was posted, no optimization for clicks/engagement. On top of this, the main users I see of this platform will be people who want to track books, not do much engagement with others but it could change as the app gets more traction.

2 Questions I have

• Can anyone suggest examples of social networks built on Github or built using PaaS tools?
• Is there any API/dataset I can use to access book information? (free or paid)

Current status

I have been working on some foundational work recently and I hope to release an alpha/beta soon for others to try to get more feedback.