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Carrel

A peer-to-peer reader for the open web

A reading life
of your own.

Read on your own computer. Share articles and a few words with people you trust, peer to peer. Your archive stays yours.

Get Carrel Read the guide Free & open source · Desktop · Pre-alpha

A network between people

From your computer
to a friend’s.

Exchange contact codes, check each other’s public keys, and choose to follow each other. Your reading circle is the people you choose.

How sharing works
YouYour computer · your keysYour private archive
Article + share notePeer-to-peer exchange
A friendTheir computer · their keysTheir own saved copy
The chosen article, its cached images and your share note travel to your friend. They keep a copy to read offline. Your personal highlights, notes, subscriptions and reading state stay private.

Shares wait locally while a friend is offline. Both apps exchange when they can connect, with relay connectivity where needed. There is no Carrel account or central service we operate.

Your own paired desktops sync private reading state separately. Following a friend never grants access to your private archive.

Library An article to return to

The commonplace · A reading example

Some things are
worth keeping.

A sentence underlined. A thought in the margin.
The beginnings of a conversation.

Reading leaves traces. A phrase comes back to you on a walk. An argument changes the way you see something. You find a passage and know exactly who you want to send it to.

A commonplace book gives these encounters somewhere to live. What you keep becomes a record of what you noticed, and what you noticed becomes a way of thinking.

You don’t need to keep everything. Just enough to find your way back.

The reading roomAn illustrative view, with example text.
Read

The web, at
your own pace.

Bring your RSS, Atom and JSON feeds. Save an article you found along the way. Read from your local archive, even offline, with typography you can make your own.

Make yourself at home
Keep

A commonplace
book, quietly growing.

Underline a passage. Leave a note. Return to what you noticed, with the archived article for context. Your highlights and notes can leave with you as Markdown.

Reading & marginalia
Share

“I thought
you’d like this.”

Choose a person and send an archived article directly to their computer, perhaps with a few words about why. A small act of curation between people who trust each other’s taste.

Sharing with a friend

A small, deliberate corner of the internet

Good reading
has always been
personal.

There was something good in Google Reader’s small circles: people who read carefully, shared what was worth sharing, and trusted each other’s taste. A recommendation arrived with a person behind it.

Carrel grows from that memory, and from an older habit: keeping a commonplace book. What you read, what you noticed, and who you wanted to tell belong to the same reading life.

The open web still gives us the raw material. Blogs still publish. Feeds still work. We want a tool that makes room for that life again, on our own computers, among people we choose.

Read the full vision

The shape of the tool

Yours to read.
Yours to keep.

At home on your computer.
Your archive lives locally, under your own keys. Reading doesn’t require a Carrel account. Your own paired desktops can exchange private state.
Small circles, chosen by you.
Sharing goes to a person you explicitly choose. The article and your vouch travel together; your personal highlights, notes and reading state stay private.
A place you can put down.
No engagement metrics, algorithmic recommendations or notifications outside the app. You decide when something is read, and when you’re done.
Open, all the way through.
Open source under AGPL-3.0-or-later. OPML for subscriptions, Markdown for your annotations. No telemetry or central Carrel service we operate.

A work in progress, made to be used

Pull up a chair.

Carrel is pre-alpha. The desktop reader, local archive, highlights, notes, private device sync and first one-person sharing flow are implemented. Physical two-desktop trials and broader platform checks are still in progress.

Keep a private backup of anything you can’t replace. Books and papers metadata, mobile, send-to-ereader and public sharing belong to the longer vision.

Installation guide Release packages

Apple Silicon & Intel Mac · Linux x86-64
Early Mac builds are ad-hoc signed, without notarization.