A link for when someone asks what you're reading

Someone asks what you've been reading. You reach for your phone. And then you do the thing where you name three books, forget the good one, remember it forty minutes later, and by then the conversation has moved on to house prices.

That's the problem. It's a small problem. It's also constant, and small constant problems are the best kind to fix.

Your own page, at your own handle

Pick a handle and you get a public page — a clean, readable view of what you're reading, what you've finished, and what's queued. Send the link. That's the whole interaction.

The handle is yours and it's changeable exactly once. Once, because links you've sent to people should keep working, and because if I let people change handles freely someone would eventually squat every good one. The old link keeps redirecting after you change it, so nothing you've already shared breaks.

These pages load fast, look decent when pasted into a chat, and are readable by anyone with the link — no account, no signup wall, no "create an account to view this list." I've never once enjoyed hitting one of those.

The best sharing feature is the one where the person you sent it to doesn't have to sign up for anything.

Three levels of sharing, because "public" is a big word

• Public profile. A page at your handle, visible to anyone with the link and indexable if you want the world to find it.
• Private invites. Email a specific person. They see your library inside their own account, in a "shared with me" section. Nobody else does.
• Group links. Share one shelf instead of everything. Your book club doesn't need to see the trashy stuff. Not judging. I have shelves too.

Invites can be revoked whenever, and revoked means revoked — the person loses access immediately, not at some cache expiry six hours from now.

Stats get their own link

Separate from all this, your reading stats have their own share link, with view counts and a compare mode so two people can put their years side by side.

The compare mode was the single most requested thing after launch, entirely because readers are quietly competitive and would rather die than say so out loud.

Off by default, and I mean it

Nothing is shared unless you turn it on. No profile exists until you make one. Your library is private the moment you sign up and stays that way through pure inaction, which is how privacy defaults should work.

The signed-in app is entirely blocked from search engines — dashboards, settings, series pages, all of it. The only pages a crawler can reach are the ones you deliberately made public, plus articles like this one.