About

A list that forgets is still a list.

One that remembers everything stops being a reading list and quietly becomes a debt.

I used the usual read-later apps for years, and each one ended the same way: a few thousand links I would never open, in folders I would never browse, reminding me of the person I had meant to be that month. The fix was not better tagging. The fix was an expiry date.

So this one forgets on purpose. An item you open is spent and leaves that evening. An item you never get to expires after thirty days without asking. What survives is only what you went back for, which turns out to be a far shorter and far more honest list.

The name is the idea of a single-serving acquaintance — someone you meet once, in transit, and never see again. Most of what any of us save to read later is exactly that, and pretending otherwise is what makes the pile.

How it is built

A static front end, a small Go service behind it, SQLite for storage, one box in Amsterdam. No queue, no cluster, no analytics, nothing to page me at three in the morning. The clients are native rather than wrapped web views, because the whole point is that it stays fast on a bad connection.

Who

One person, as a side project, under the handle Paper Street. It is not a company, there is no funding round, and it will not be acquired. If it ever stops being useful to me it will go read-only and you will get an export — not a shutdown notice with thirty days' warning.

Mail goes to the address in security.txt. I answer slowly, but I answer.