Every reading app asks you to sign up. The account is how your preferences follow you across devices. It's also the starting point for a relationship you didn't explicitly agree to: one where you gave the app your email, agreed to terms, and let a server hold everything you've read.
The account isn't there for your convenience. It's there because the app needs it. An account is what makes reading data attributable to a person.
Slow Web has no account. Your feeds, your highlights, your settings live on your device, in a local database that never leaves it. There's no sync server. There's nothing to log into.
I remember when software didn't need to know who you were. You installed it, it ran, and that was the relationship. The account came later. Not because users needed one, but because the product needed the data.
When you add a feed in Slow Web, it saves locally. When you highlight a sentence, it saves locally. When you switch phones, you go to Settings, export a backup file, and import it on the new device. No server in the middle. No account to migrate.
The tradeoff is real: your data doesn't sync automatically across devices. One device, one database. If that's a dealbreaker, there are other RSS readers with accounts. If you read on one phone and want to own what you've built, Slow Web keeps it where you can see it.