Standards Athenana speaks
Athenana is a private, invitation-only place to keep things, but the ways in and out of it are open standards rather than an interface of its own invention. Other software can work with your library without either side having been built for the other.
This page says what each of those standards buys you. The exact addresses, and what a client can rely on down to the detail, are on Athenana’s own standards page — which is where they belong, because every endpoint there is checked against the running code.
Micropub
Micropub is the standard way an application posts to a site you own. A client that speaks it — an editor, a Shortcut, something you wrote yourself — can create a post here, change it, delete it and put it back, using a token you issue from Settings and can revoke at any time. Nothing has to be written for Athenana in particular.
Posting is not publishing. A note, a highlight or an image arrives private whatever sent it, and stays that way until you decide otherwise.
IndieAuth
How a client gets permission without anybody pasting a secret around. You never paste a token into somebody else’s app: the client sends you to Athenana, you approve it there, and it receives permission for the things it asked for and nothing else. Every token is listed on your account and can be withdrawn one at a time.
Webmention
Being told when one page links to another, in both directions. When something you have published links out, the site you linked to is told. When somebody else’s page links to one of yours, Athenana collects it.
Nothing appears under your post until you approve it. Anyone can publish a page saying anything and aim it at you, so a mention that arrives is yours to accept or ignore rather than something that lands on your page on a stranger’s say-so.
The sending half rarely finds anyone home, and it is fairer to say so than to leave the impression it hums along: most of the web does not implement Webmention at all. Measured in September 2026, one of 182 links published from here had a site at the other end able to receive the notice. Nothing is wasted on the rest — a site with no endpoint is noted once and never asked again.
ActivityPub
If you have a blog, someone on Mastodon can follow it, and what you publish is delivered to them there.
It is deliberately one-way, and that is worth knowing before you rely on it. Replies, likes and boosts sent back are accepted by the server and then discarded: they are not stored and never appear anywhere, and nobody is notified they were sent. Accepting them would mean holding and moderating other people’s writing, which is not what this is for.
Feeds
The shared front page and each blog publish an RSS feed and a JSON feed. Any reader can follow either, and nothing about following one is reported back to Athenana.
Google Reader API
If you read your feeds in a news reader that speaks the old Google Reader protocol — NetNewsWire, Reeder and others — it can sync with Athenana. You sign in with your account’s email address and a Reader app token you make in Settings, never your sign-in password, and the feeds you follow arrive in your reader, folders and all.
Starring an article saves it to your library as a private item, so a story worth keeping does not stay behind in the reader; anything you had already saved stays as it was. It goes one way: unstarring in the reader does not remove what was saved.
Subscriptions are managed on Athenana’s Feeds page, not from the reader, so an app cannot add, remove or rename what you follow. Which articles you have read is kept only for your reader and is never shown anywhere in Athenana.
What is not implemented
Named here because a page listing only what works reads as a claim to all of it. There is no WebSub hub, so feeds followed here are polled once a day rather than pushed the moment something appears. A feed offered as JSON Feed can be followed from Athenana like RSS or Atom. The full list, with the reasoning for each, is on Athenana’s standards page.
Something behaving differently from what this page says is a bug worth telling us about: support@wyome.com.