Sill: The antidote to doomscrolling

You know the feeling. All the news is bad. It is both hard to look and hard to look away. Your blood pressure builds. Your breathing gets more rapid. Your fuse is short, and everyone around you can tell.

You are doomscrolling, and you can't stop.

I've been there nearly every day for the last decade. The reality is that real time social media feeds are a stressful way to consume news.

And yet! Building your own information feed by following the people you trust is maybe the best way to get news ever designed. Follow a couple hundred trusted journalists and you'll get the big news immediately, regardless of who originally got the scoop.

What do we do with this paradox? With Sill , I've built a tool that can help you get the most out of your network while keeping you sane by reducing the need to doomscroll. Let's walk through how.

Sill prioritizes the mighty link

The most powerful thing you can do on social media is share a link. The link is what makes the web unlike any communication technology ever devised. It's proof, a citation. While a link isn't a guarantee that the information contained within is true, it has a higher trust signal than the average post on social media.

Sill is all about the link. If you connect Sill to your Bluesky and/or Mastodon accounts, it reads your timeline to find any links that people post. It then aggregates those links into a personalized trending feed organized by the most popular links in your network.

At the time of writing, the Wall Street Journal's bombshell story revealing the birthday letter Donald Trump wrote Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 is the biggest story in my network. Twenty-eight accounts I follow posted it. Those posts were made in the span of roughly three hours.

I didn't need to read my timeline for those three hours. Instead, Sill watches for me, and I can use Sill to get the story and all of the context my network provides in one place.

(As an added bonus, Sill will find gift links for you for paywalled stories! Just click the gift icon in the toolbar. Not all stories have gift links.)

Sill meets you where you are

What if you don't want another site to visit? We all have too much to do, so adding another thing to your routine can be overwhelming. Thankfully, Sill meets you where you are with customizable email newsletters and RSS feeds. Sill offers two ways of producing feeds: Daily Digests and Notifications.

Daily Digests

The Daily Digest rounds up the ten most popular links in your network and sends them to you via either email or RSS at the time of your choosing. Want a morning newsletter with the top news from the past 24 hours to start your day? Great, schedule it for 9:00 a.m. Would you rather have something in the evening? Then schedule for 5:00 p.m. Here's the top of my digest from last Friday evening:

Daily Digests are a great, simple way of getting news from the sources you trust without getting sucked into a real time feed. To get started with your Daily Digest, go to your Digest Settings in your Sill account.

Notifications

Notifications are a more powerful way of customizing when Sill tells you about links in your network. Like the Daily Digest, you can get Notifications via email or RSS. Sill offers a number of parameters by which you can configure your notifications, including:

Number of shares: Sill can send you Notifications whenever a link is shared by n or more people you follow. This is a great way of getting only the biggest news.

Link URL: Sill can send you Notifications whenever the domain of a URL matches your search. For example, I could make a feed of all nytimes.com links shared in my network.

List name: If you have any custom lists or feeds you like on Bluesky or Mastodon, you can enable those in your Sill connection settings . Sill will then watch those feeds just like your timeline. Then, when configuring Notifications, you can get a Notification whenever a link is posted to a particular feed.

And more!

You can also combine these parameters for really powerful feeds. For example, I maintain a list of basketball writers on Bluesky. I use Sill to create a Notification RSS feed for whenever two or more people in my basketball list share the same link.

With a robust set of Notifications, Sill can do all the hard work for you, keeping you up to date whenever anything big happens while giving you your time back. To get started with Notifications, head to your Notification settings after you've created a Sill account.

Sign up for Sill and stop doomscrolling.