Getting started
Sign in, subscribe to a few publications, and learn where everything lives. Ten minutes, once.
Signing in
Standard Reader has no password of its own. You sign in with a Bluesky account — or any other account on the same network — and that account is where your reading is stored.
- Select Log in, at the bottom of the sidebar on a computer or in the top bar on a phone.
- Type your handle — the name that looks like yourname.bsky.social — and continue.
- Your account provider (Bluesky, usually) asks whether Standard Reader may act on your behalf. Approve it, and you land back here signed in.
Subscribing to your first publications
The first time you sign in, a short setup walks you through it: pick a few topics you care about, see which of the people you already follow on Bluesky write here, subscribe to anything that appeals, and choose how you like your text. You can skip any step, and skip the whole thing.
After that it is one button. Anywhere you see a publication — a card in a feed, the top of an article, a publication's own page — there is a Subscribe button next to its name. Select it again to unsubscribe. Nothing else changes: the button just decides whether new writing from that publication reaches your Home and Latest.
If you already know what you want, Discover lists everything on the network, and Finding things to read covers every way to get there.
Finding your way around
On a computer, a sidebar runs down the left of every screen. From the top:
- Home — your day: one featured article, then what is new from the publications you subscribe to.
- Latest — everything new in the order it was published, with tabs for unread, your subscriptions, and the whole network.
- Saved — the queue of articles you put aside. A badge shows how many are waiting.
- Discover — the directory of every publication the network knows about.
- Search — find publications, people, topics, and headlines by name.
Below those, the publications you subscribe to are listed for quick access. The Subscriptions heading above them opens the full management view. At the very bottom, your avatar opens a menu with your profile, reading history, recommended articles, feedback, settings, and log out.
On your phone
The sidebar becomes a bar of tabs floating at the bottom of the screen, with the same destinations. The top bar hides as you scroll down and comes back as you scroll up, so a page of writing is mostly writing.
Installing Standard Reader
Standard Reader can be installed like an app, straight from the browser, with no store involved. On a phone, use your browser's Add to Home Screen; on a computer, look for the install button in the address bar. You get an icon, a window without browser chrome, and the same account you already have.
Reading offline
Pages you have already visited stay available when your connection drops, and you get a plain offline page rather than a browser error when you reach for something that was never loaded. When a new version of the app is ready it offers to reload, rather than changing under you mid-article.
Reading without an account
You do not need to sign in to read. Articles, publications, topics, Discover, and search all work signed out, and anyone you send a link to can open it.
What signing in adds is memory: following publications, saving articles, tracking what you have read, recommending, lists, and settings that follow you between devices. All of that needs somewhere to store it — which is your account.