14 points eduardosasso 2 hours ago 13 comments

Hi HN, for the past few months I’ve been working on a read later app called RDLTR (https://rdltr.app). The whole thing started because I had so many tabs open with stuff I wanted to read, across browsers, Mac, Linux, and iPhone. They cluttered everything and got in the way of other things I had to do.

Pocket had just shut down when this idea came up, I looked around, tried Instapaper, Raindrop, Matter, and a few others I forget. They were fine, but they all give you a list that only grows, which is another thing to maintain, and not the model I had in mind. Safari has this Reading List feature where you read something and it drops off the unread list. But it’s Apple only and half worked. What I wanted was inbox zero for reading. Open something, read it, come back, and it’s gone from the queue but still in the archive. You keep going until there is nothing left.

Links come in from anywhere. Paste a URL on the page, drag one in, or use the bookmarklet, the Chrome and Firefox extensions, or the Apple Shortcut for the iOS share sheet, plus Vim keys, TL;DR summaries on each link, search across everything you have read or saved, RSS for every list, and it works just as well on the phone.

The extensions have a couple of tricks that I use all the time. Shift+DD pulls the article text, cleans it up, and sends it to ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini in a new tab, so you can ask it anything about what you just read. Shift+AA opens it in the Internet Archive, handy for paywalled sites when you don’t have a subscription.

The stack is Bun, TypeScript, HTMX, and SQLite, with SSE so the list updates the moment you save or read something, deployed on a Hetzner VPS.

Full disclosure, Claude Code wrote most of it. I still spent a ton of time dogfooding, testing, and polishing the UI until things felt right.

Anyway, curious to know what your current setup is for this.

yawnxyz 2 hours ago | parent

this is really nice! i think it looks great!

the infinite scroll prevents the footer from ever being seen though

https://rdltr.app/help is in the footer and it looks really helpful!

also, any plans to open source 0:)

eduardosasso 2 hours ago | parent

thanks! planning to open sourcing it soon!

yawnxyz 2 hours ago | parent

i absolutely love seeing the entire feed of links - already found a few great reads. thanks for this treasure!!!!

p2detar 1 hour ago | parent

This looks cool! Will try it tonight. 8k links - I guess you got a nice user-base already. Was it easy to market?

eduardosasso 1 hour ago | parent

it's mostly me for now, im a hoarder for links and things to read. dogfooding the app heavily.

staindk 1 hour ago | parent

Very cool idea.

Don't think I can go all-in on something like this without some way to guarantee I don't lose all my saved stuff - perhaps a way to sync to a cloud storage service, or at least an easy way to export everything manually to a file?

eduardosasso 1 hour ago | parent

coming soon. had to stop building to focus on launching it for a bit.

michaelfallon 1 hour ago | parent

Once something moves into the archive, do you find yourself going back to it? I’m interested in what happens after reading, when you remember there was something useful but can’t remember enough to search for it.

eduardosasso 1 hour ago | parent

Not often, but it's convenient when I want to go back to something I read recently. I think there's more that can be done to surface stuff like what I do in https://rdltr.app/topics and https://rdltr.app/trends but for each user

ASalazarMX 1 hour ago | parent

OMG the home page is full of links that I might want to read too. This doesn't bode well for my curiosity.

eduardosasso 1 hour ago | parent

hehe, dig in.

agybay_07 29 minutes ago | parent

I read through the Privacy Policy and noticed that the text of an article can be sent to an external AI service. Just wondering, will there be some kind of preview or confirmation before the content is actually sent? I’m particularly curious about this for internal or private pages, since those might contain information that shouldn’t be shared externall

eduardosasso 26 minutes ago | parent

not currently, but that could potentially be a user setting, haven't put much thought into it to be honest.