Window Sill Is the Best Way to Read Bluesky and Mastadon Links
I watch Bluesky and Mastodon feeds every day and sometimes I get tired of reading other people’s thoughts and opinions on everything. Sometimes I just want to see only useful links in my feed, and Sill is a new tool that lets me do that: You can think of Sill as a link-only RSS feed in your Mastodon and Bluesky feeds . It’s much like what Nuzzel used to be for links on Twitter (now X), before the social network acquired the service and integrated it into the Twitter app.
Why you should try Sill
Sill offers you an easy way to stay up to date with news, blog posts, and interesting links posted in your feed. This means you can avoid angry posts, all the chatter surrounding important news events, memes, and other distractions. As long as you follow helpful accounts that share great links, Sill is a useful tool to keep up with what’s going on. Remember that the quality of your Sill feed depends on the accounts you follow and the links they share, but the service has good filters to help you tailor your feed.
Setting up a Sill account
For this service, you need to create an account and link it with your Mastodon and Bluesky accounts. Once you do this, you will be able to quickly see all the links in your Sill feed. The initial setup process went pretty smoothly for me, but Sill asks that you disable the “Group Timeline Enhancement” setting in Mastodon for best results. This is necessary if you want to know how many people have shared a particular link, allowing you to focus on the popular links on any given day.
Using filters to improve your experience
Sill allows you to use filters to tailor your feed to your tastes. You can ask the service to hide links from reposts, that is, it will only show links posted directly. You can also customize 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 either 12 or 24 hours will be optimal.
You can sort posts by popularity or recency, depending on how you want your feed to look. I prefer to look at the most recent posts first, but you can try both to see which one is perfect for you. Finally, you can filter messages from Mastodon or Bluesky, or view links from both sites. I also like Silla’s muting filters. Below each link, you will find a mute button that allows you to hide that specific link from your feed or hide all links from that website. You can even visit the moderation page to disable individual keywords, which is another nice touch for keeping your feed clean.