Walkthrough · readers

Day to day, from first sign-in to the loop the app is built around

Normal user experience, from signing in, finding something, following it, and being told when it moves. Every screen below is what an ordinary account sees.

← Back to the project page

1. Signing in

There is no account to create. Marginalia checks the password against Kavita's own user table, so whatever gets you into Kavita gets you in here on the first try. If your server hands sign-in to an identity provider, a Sign in with … button appears above the password form instead.

Marginalia sign-in page with username and password fields

2. Landing on Browse

You arrive at your whole collection, shelved rather than dumped into one flat grid. Continue reading comes first, then recently added, then a shelf per library. Card sizes vary by shelf on purpose, so the page has a shape instead of being a wall.

Browse page showing shelves of series cards for continue reading, recently added, and per library — The Overview / All series / Tags switch at the top is the entry point to the other two views.

Shelves are for picking something up again. When you would rather just wander, the All series tab drops the shelving and gives you one library at a time.

All series view with a library sidebar listing each configured library and its series count, showing the Manga library sorted by highest rated — Sixty to a page, sorted by rating. Search, a reading-status filter and the sort apply within whichever library you picked, so the four libraries stay separate rather than being tipped into one pile.

3. Tag Browser

The Tags view turns everything Kavita and MangaBaka know about your library into a browsable index — genres, activities, demographics, character archetypes — each with a count of how many series you actually own under it.

Genres and themes page listing tag pills grouped into genres, activities, audience demographics and character archetypes, each with a count — 1,655 tags across this collection. These are counts of what is on the server, not a catalogue of what exists across the entire database.

Picking one drills through to just those series, and tags combine — so you can narrow to the intersection rather than starting over from a single-tag list.

Tag drill-down page listing every series in the library carrying the Comedy tag — Drilling into Comedy. Adding a second tag narrows the same list rather than replacing it.

4. The series page

Everything known about one series in a single view: your progress, the metadata Marginalia matched from MangaBaka, community ratings, credits, and where it sits in the catalogue's popularity ranking.

Series detail page for Attack on Titan with a blurred-cover hero, series data sidebar, synopsis, credits, genres and themes — Chapter and volume counts, publishing status, whether there is an anime, whether it is officially licensed, and its rank in the catalogue — none of which Kavita tracks. Open in Kavita is always one click away; Marginalia describes your library, it does not replace the reader. Genres and themes are the same clickable pills as the Tags view.

Creator names are links. Following one gives you their full bibliography — every credited work in the metadata catalogue, with the ones already sitting on your server marked as such.

Creator bibliography page for Hajime Isayama showing all fifteen credited works, filtered by whether each is in Kavita — Fifteen credited works, one of them on this server. The In Kavita / Not in Kavita filter is the useful part — it answers `what else of theirs do I have?` without a search. Covers here come from MangaBaka rather than your library.

5. Following a series

This is the loop the app is built around. My Series lists everything you have in progress; the Watch toggle on a row is the whole subscription mechanism.

My Series page listing in-progress series with progress bars, watch toggles, catch-up thresholds and publishing alert pills — The amber pills are catch-up thresholds and the blue ones are publishing-status alerts — both set per series from Configure.

Catch-up reminders are the setting worth understanding. Setting a threshold records where you are now and then says nothing. It pings you later, once enough new chapters have landed that your completion has fallen back to that number. It is for series you would rather binge than read one chapter at a time.

6. Deciding what reaches you

Notification settings open with a plain-English summary of what you are currently signed up for, so you never have to reverse-engineer it from a column of switches.

Notification settings page with a summary panel, per-event delivery rows, channel routing and snooze controls — Each event routes to a named channel, and each can be snoozed for a few days without clearing the thresholds behind it. New chapters is a scope dropdown, not a toggle — `everything in my libraries` is a firehose on a busy server, and the page says so.

7. Finding the next thing

Discover works from what you have actually been reading. Each row starts from one of your series and shows what MangaBaka readers of that series also enjoyed — then filters the result down to series already on this server that you have not started. The series that get listed here are refreshed every 24 hours.

Discover page showing rows of recommendations, each seeded from a series the reader recently finished — The Popular and Highest rated tabs are catalogue-wide views for when you want to browse outside your own habits.

What leaves your server: the recommendation lookups are made by the server against MangaBaka and carry manga IDs only — never your account or your reading. Covers and titles on this page come from your own library, so your browser never talks to MangaBaka at all. An admin can switch the whole hub off.

8. What you have already read

Reading history is week by week, paginated backwards, counting chapters and pages per series. It makes "how much did I actually read last month" a question with an answer.

Reading history page broken into weekly sections with per-series chapter and page counts — 19,894 pages across 472 chapters in this four-week window. Kavita knows where you are in a book; this is the part that keeps it as history rather than just a current position.

Bookmarks is the gallery of pages you saved while reading — grouped by series, each reopening at full size, each able to carry a Markdown note.

Bookmark gallery grouped by series, each saved page shown as a thumbnail with share and note buttons — Thirty-seven saved pages across eleven series. Any one can be published on a public share link, up to a per-user cap the admin sets — 4 of 10 used here.

9. Achievements

Tiered families rather than one-shot badges. Each card shows the tier you are on, the next threshold, and how far along you are — so a card is a progress bar, not a lottery ticket.

If more than one person reads off the server, there is a shared set everyone contributes to.

Server achievements page showing goals the whole install contributes to — The same engine, aggregated across the install — a reason to care that you are all reading off the same box.

10. Two settings worth knowing about

Safe Mode is for reading somewhere other people can see your screen. You pick a content ceiling and optionally whole libraries to hide, and it applies across browsing, Discover, My Series, history and bookmarks.

Content and safety settings page with a safe mode toggle, three content ceiling options and a per-library hide list — It changes only what you see, never what you are allowed to reach — and it has an on/off switch in the account menu so you can flip it without coming back here. Opening a hidden series directly shows a cover screen.

The profile page holds the rest: your public profile, the Discord ID that lets notifications @-mention you, and the timezone your streaks and time-of-day feats are judged in.

Public profiles are opt-in — nothing about you is reachable on a link until you turn it on. The timezone was detected at first sign-in; this is where you correct it.

Dark mode

Not a filter laid over the light theme — the palette is remapped, and it is the same set of design tokens either way. Toggled from the navbar, remembered per browser, with no flash of the wrong theme on load.