Nothing to sell, so nothing to optimize
A feed funded by advertising has to maximize the time you spend in it. Forage has no advertising, so ranking is allowed to be boring: it answers the question you asked.
There are no third-party analytics scripts and no tracking pixels on Forage's pages, and your reading data is not brokered to anyone.
Self-hosted and invite-only
Forage runs on its own host rather than inside someone else's platform, and new accounts arrive by invitation, with a waitlist for everyone else. Invite-only keeps the instance small enough to stay accountable.
The specific commitments — what is collected, how it is used, and what is never done with it — live in the public legal pages, readable without an account.
Your content is portable
Because your posts publish on your own subdomain with their own RSS feed and canonical URLs, leaving is a matter of pointing your readers somewhere else. A service you cannot leave is a service that does not have to keep its promises.