Turn a firehose of newsletters and news sources into bite-sized, source-tracked units you actually read — then publish your own digest with citations attached automatically. No copy-pasting. No lock-in. No cloud middleman.
Newsletters arrive in your inbox. Articles live in browser tabs. You lose your place every time you switch context.
You have no canonical copy. Services shut down. Paywalls move. Your reading history belongs to someone else's database.
Turning what you read into writing means hunting down the original URL, pulling the right quote, formatting a reference. Every. Single. Time.
Every reader app, every newsletter tool has a conflict of interest with you. Their incentive is your continued subscription, not your autonomy.
Samizdat collapses the read → curate → publish loop into a single pipeline that runs on hardware you control, stores everything as Markdown you own, and hands you a citable, publish-ready digest with one command.
Point an email alias at your server for newsletters. Add RSS feeds for news portals. Everything lands in one place.
Each canonical URL is fetched exactly once — never twice, never for each subscriber. The result is stored as Markdown in your vault. Scraping is expensive and ban-prone; Samizdat respects that.
Your editable Pipeline runs over
each Document and emits bite-sized
Highlights — the key facts, quotes,
and ideas, tagged and sorted. The breakdown is
personal; the document is shared.
The mobile app syncs highlights offline-first. Swipe to curate. Every linked URL is tracked and openable. One tap to mark, annotate, or skip.
Run sam digest. Every item you
curated becomes a bullet with the source URL,
quote, and original context already wired. No
copy-paste. Publish to email, the web, or
anywhere.
The hub. REST API, cron worker, scraper engine,
dedup, pipeline runner, TLS — everything in a single
static binary you can scp anywhere.
The reader. Offline-first, swipe-to-curate, syncs with your server. Runs on iOS, Android, and the web from one codebase.
Meet sam the power user's and the
robot's interface. Init, configure providers, manage
jobs, run pipelines, generate digests — all
headless, all scriptable.
[IN PROGRESS] The browser extension. Clip any page, highlight text, add it to your pipeline on the fly — posts to your server's same API.
Markdown vault is the source of truth.
SQLite is a rebuildable index.
sam reindex reconstructs the DB from
your files at any time.
Nothing lives only in a hosted DB.
Everything has a Markdown path. You own and take
care of backup. Single command archive.
sam archive current
Scrape one URL once. Deduplication by canonical URL happens before any network request. Scraping is expensive; we respect that.
Phase split is sacred.
Scraper → Document is opinion-free and
community-maintainable.
Pipeline → Highlight is personal. Never
mix them.
Paywalled content stays local. Credentialed content never goes to a cloud LLM by default — it's routed to your local AI provider.
One binary, no Docker, no nginx.
scp it, run it. TLS is in-binary via
CertMagic. The happy path has no moving parts.
Samizdat — self-published, hand-passed, traceable writing. Underground, anti-corporate, self rolled.
"There is an inherent conflict of interest between you as the publisher and the for-profit platforms that feed you info. Capitalism's incentive is to lock you in, manipulate your consumption. Make your own feed, that serves you."
Focus on what YOU care about, what you consume. The algorithm keeps you scrolling; gain control of it.
Samizdat has no engagement metric. No recommendation engine. No "you might also like." It does exactly what you configure it to do — and the configuration is a text file you own.
OSS-first. Self hosted, self rolled.
Single static binary. No Docker, no database setup, no accounts, bring your own LLM.