Welcome to Standard Reader
A calm place to read long-form writing, and to keep finding new writers worth following. This guide walks through everything the app can do — no technical knowledge needed.
What Standard Reader is
Standard Reader is a reader for online magazines, newsletters, and personal blogs. You subscribe to the ones you like, and their new writing shows up here — in order, without an algorithm deciding what you see or an inbox to keep clean.
It is also a directory. Because every publication here speaks the same open format, the app can show you the whole known network, not just the part you already subscribe to. Finding a new voice is meant to be as easy as catching up on the ones you have.
Why it works differently
Most reading apps keep your list of follows on their own servers. If the app shuts down, your list goes with it.
Standard Reader works the other way round. You sign in with a Bluesky account, and the things you do here — what you subscribe to, follow, save, recommend, and read — are written into your own account's storage, the same place your Bluesky posts live. We keep a copy so the app is fast, but the original is yours. Another app built on the same network can read it, and if you stop using Standard Reader, none of it disappears.
The same is true for the writing itself. Articles here are not hosted by us; they live wherever their author publishes them, and Standard Reader indexes and displays them. Nothing you read is locked in.
Start here
Read straight through, or jump to whatever you are trying to do.
Getting help
If something is confusing, broken, or missing, the feedback board is the place to say so. It takes bug reports, feature requests, and plain questions, and you can read and vote on what other people have already asked for.
If you write software and want to build on the same network, the developer documentation covers the API, the record formats, and the renderers. This guide does not assume you will ever go there.