🗂️Keep in Mind 'Sill' Is the Best Way to Read Bluesky and Mastadon Links

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I scroll through my Bluesky and Mastodon feeds every day and I sometimes grow tired of reading other people's musings and opinions on everything. Some days, I just want to catch up on just the useful links in my timeline and Sill is a new tool that lets me do just that—you can think of Sill as an RSS feed just for the links in your Mastodon and Bluesky timelines. This is a lot like what Nuzzel used to be for links on Twitter (now X), before the service was acquired by the social network and integrated into the Twitter app.

Why you should try Sill​

Credit: Pranay Parab

Sill offers you an easy way to catch up with news, blog posts, and interesting links shared to your timeline. This means that you can steer clear of angry posts, all the chatter around big news events, memes, and other distractions. As long as you follow useful accounts that share great links, Sill's a useful tool to catch up with what's going on. Remember that the quality of your Sill feed depends on accounts you follow and the links they share, but the service has good filters to help you tailor your feed.

Setting up your Sill account​

This service requires you to create an account and link it your Mastodon and Bluesky accounts. Once you do that, you'll be able to quickly see all the links on your Sill feed. The initial set up process was quite smooth for me, but Sill does ask you to turn off the "Group boost in timelines" preference in Mastodon for best results. This is required if you want to know how many people shared a particular link, which allows you to zero in on trending links on any given day.

Using filters to improve your experience​

Credit: Pranay Parab

Sill allows you to use filters to tailor your feed to your tastes. You can ask the service to hide links from reposts, which means that it'll only show the links posted directly. You can also set up your feed to show posts from the last 24 hours, 12 hours, six hours, or three hours. If you follow a lot of accounts and are only interested in the most recent links, then three hours is ideal, but for most people, the sweet spot is going to be either 12 or 24 hours.

You can sort posts by popularity or recency, depending on how you want to see your feed. I prefer to see the most recent posts first, but you can try both options to see which one is ideal for you. Lastly, you can choose to filter out posts from Mastodon or Bluesky, or choose to see links from both sites. I also like Sill's mute filters. You'll find a mute button below each link, which lets you hide that particular link from your feed, or hide all links from that website. You may even visit the moderation page to mute individual keywords, which is another nice touch to keep your feed clean.

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