Otium

Otium is a reader for people who want to read less, on purpose. Most feed apps are built to maximize time-on-app; Otium is built to give you a bounded, explainable reading session and then let you leave. You tell it how much time you have, it assembles a session from your sources, and it shows its work on why each item made the cut.

How it works

• Weighted feeds, not an algorithm. You subscribe to RSS and YouTube sources and give them weights. The mix you get reflects the weights you set, not an opaque model optimizing for retention.
• Time-boxed sessions. Instead of an endless list, a session is sized to the minutes you have. When it’s done, it’s done.
• Explainable surfacing. Every item can tell you why it’s here - which source, which weighting, how fresh - so the queue never feels arbitrary.
• Anti-analytics by design. There’s no “time spent” score to climb, no streaks, no dark patterns. The app “remembers” what you’ve seen so it doesn’t re-serve it, and otherwise stays out of the way.

Where it’s going

It’s mid-way through a v2 redesign that reorganizes everything into a Sections and Topics tree, moves to genuinely time-based sessions, and adds calm, descriptive analytics (what you read, not how long you stared). It runs as a Go API plus a React SPA on my Kubernetes cluster, behind my own single-sign-on.