Reading, without the algorithm
There's a particular kind of tiredness that comes from modern feeds. You open an app to read one thing and a machine decides, on your behalf, what you'll see, in what order, and how long you'll stay. The feed is bottomless. The unread count is a slot machine. You close it ten minutes later having read nothing you meant to.
Pinstack is a reader built against that. Your subscriptions, in the order they were published, with no algorithm choosing for you. It's quiet on purpose.
What it actually is
Pinstack is an RSS reader with a paper-like, deliberately boring interface. You add the feeds you care about. New items land in a chronological Inbox. You read them, or you don't. Nothing is ranked, boosted, or "recommended."
A few things make it calm rather than just minimal:
- A focus reader. Open any article into a clean, full-screen reading view — adjustable text size, a light or dark reading theme, and a quiet progress bar. Just the words.
- Digest mode for noisy feeds. Some feeds post twenty times a day. Instead of muting them (too blunt) or letting them flood your Inbox, mark a feed as digest: its items step out of the main flow and collect in one place, grouped by collection, to read on your own cadence. No "top picks," no ranking — just batched, when you want it.
- Collections & search. Group feeds the way you think about them. Full-text search across everything you've subscribed to.
- It works on your phone the way a phone should — a simple drill-down, swipe to archive, a real reading view.
Bookmarks, too
Pinstack recently grew a home for the other half of reading — the links you want to keep. You can import a full Pinboard export (or any browser's bookmarks), browse by tag, search, and read saved pages in the same focus reader. Save new links from a paste box, a desktop bookmarklet, or a one-tap iOS Shortcut. It'll even flag the dead links in an old archive so you can clean house. (Replacing a paid bookmarking subscription was, honestly, the feature that started it.)
The idea underneath
Not everything you read needs to be intentional. Some of it is relaxed, ambient, for fun — and that's fine. Pinstack just wants the split to be yours, not an engagement model's. Subscribe widely, read deliberately, let the noisy stuff pool in a digest, and keep a tidy shelf of things worth saving. A backlog you control instead of one that controls you.
No infinite scroll. No "for you." No notifications begging you back. Light, dark, or follow your system — your call.
Try it
Pinstack is invite-only while it's young — partly on purpose (a calm tool deserves a calm rollout), partly practical (it runs on one small server). If a quieter way to read sounds right, head to pinstack.in and sign in with Google — that puts you on the waitlist, and we'll wave you in. Bring a few feeds you actually love, and see what reading feels like when nobody's optimizing you.