You pick some feeds, give the group a name and an icon, and that's a channel. Every morning your edition pulls from whatever's in it. You can have multiple channels, reorder them, and enable or disable individual feeds inside each one.
Slow Web ships with a set of curated channels to start from: Indie Games, Japan Culture, Deep Work, Books, Film, and others. Each one mixes slower feeds (writers who publish once a week or less) with higher-volume sources that fill in the news. You can subscribe to any of them, then add or remove feeds until it matches what you actually want to read.
The directory is where channels from other users live. Browse by newest, most downloaded, or growing. That last one surfaces recently uploaded channels that are picking up subscribers. Find something that looks close to what you want, subscribe, and it lands in your edition. Then edit it from there.
You can also upload your own. Build a channel you'd recommend to someone, hit upload, and it shows up in the directory for anyone to find.
If you want to share a channel directly, via a group chat, a forum, or a link to a friend: export it and you get a sw1 code, a short string that encodes the whole channel. They paste it into Slow Web, import it, and get your channel with all its feeds intact. No account needed on either end.