About
What footnotes.at is
footnotes.at is a website for publishing short pieces of writing. Each piece is called a footnote. Footnotes are public, permanent, and collected on author pages.
There are no likes, comments, followers, or algorithmic feeds. Writing appears in chronological order. Readers can subscribe by email to receive new footnotes from authors they choose.
Users can save footnotes to a private collection using a feature called dog-ears. Dog-ears are visible only to the person who created them.
Who it is for
footnotes.at is for people who want to write without performing. It is useful if you have occasional thoughts worth sharing but do not want to maintain a blog, build an audience, or optimize for engagement.
It is also for readers who prefer to find writing by browsing rather than by following algorithms or social signals.
How it differs from other platforms
Medium promotes content based on engagement metrics and paywalls. footnotes.at has no metrics, no paywall, and no recommendation algorithm.
Substack is designed for newsletters with subscriber growth as the goal. footnotes.at supports email subscriptions but does not track subscriber counts or encourage list-building.
Notion is a workspace tool that can publish pages. footnotes.at is purpose-built for short-form public writing with a consistent reading experience.
Twitter/X prioritizes engagement and virality. footnotes.at has no retweets, no quote posts, no trending topics, and no notifications beyond email delivery.
How to use it
Reading
The homepage shows recent footnotes from all authors. Click any footnote to read it in full. Click an author name to see all their footnotes. Use tags to filter by topic.
Writing
Create an account and click "Write a footnote." Write in markdown. Add tags by typing #tagname in the body. Save as draft or publish immediately. Edit anytime.
Dog-ears
Click the earmark icon on any footnote to save it to your private collection. On a footnote page, you can select a specific passage before dog-earing. That passage will be underlined when you return to the page.
Subscribing
Enter your email at the bottom of any author page. Confirm via the link sent to your inbox. You will receive an email when that author publishes something new.