Settings

Username

The one thing both products show. It is what appears beside anything you say here, and it is the name Fallow Reader puts on your account and on a book or article that came from your account rather than from this device.

Volunteered, never derived — which is what makes holding it allowed at all. The account table holds an id and a date; a username is a fact you chose to tell us, the same argument that lets a device be named.

Display name

Optional, and separate on purpose. The username is an address and a display name is a greeting — one has to be unique and typeable, the other does not have to be either.

Who can see what you have read

Three answers rather than two, because friends is the relationship this product has and it deserves one of its own. It covers your shelves and anything you have said — your name is always findable, or nobody could give somebody their address.

A new account starts private, so nobody is opted into a shelf they did not know was a performance.

Only what you logged

Circle shows the articles you chose to log, one at a time. Reading something is not publishing it, and the app never decides you finished — you say so, or it never leaves your device.

So this setting does not open a shelf you did not assemble. It changes who can see the one you did. An earlier version of this page argued the opposite — that a page showing only what you chose would look like your reading and not be it — and that is a real cost, honestly stated: a logged shelf is a selection rather than a record. It was settled the other way, because a shelf nobody chose is a performance nobody consented to.

Put away stays put away

Not a setting, and it is here so nobody looks for one. What you chose not to read is not an opinion you published — it never leaves the device, at any privacy setting, including public.

The address you sign in with

The one place it appears, and deliberately the only one. Everywhere else — here, on your page, beside anything you log — shows the name above. An address is how you get back in; it is not what anybody calls you, and nobody else ever sees it.

There is no password to change. Signing in sends a six-digit code to this address, so the address is the credential — which is why there is nothing here to leak, and why changing it is a bigger thing than changing a password.

Nothing above this line is behind it. Reading, saving, marks, export, every accessibility feature, your whole circle and every list — free, uncapped, permanently. What Pro buys is quiet, and sync and search at scale.