That's virtually meaningless. A "republic" is virtually any country that doesn't have a monarchy or dictator.

So drawing a distinction between a "democracy" and a "democratic republic" in this manner is a waste of time. There plenty of democratic monarchies, which are equally democracies, too.

What I would like to see is some sort of platform that matches your ratings of a set of books against others users' ratings to determine a "correlation score" that you see when you look at ratings/reviews by other users. In this way you could say, "Hey! This reviewer has similar tastes to me, I can probably trust this review".

I'm a light user of Mastodon.