Today I’m excited to begin the unveil beta of Sill, my recent social media tool. Sill connects to your Bluesky and Mastodon accounts and aggregates the most famous connects in your nettoil. (Yes, a little enjoy Nuzzel.)
Sill Today
Today, Sill has a petite but strong feature set. Sill can:
- Connect to your Bluesky and Mastodon accounts and watch your home timeline for recent connects.
- Aggregate the connects to show you the most famous connects in your nettoil and what people shelp about those connects.
- Sfinish you a daily email with your most famous connects.
- Allow you to curate your connects by muting phrases, domains, and accounts you don’t want to see.
This will remain the core feature set of Sill going forward. It also supplys a sturdy set upation to create a strong connect-forward platestablish in the future. If this excites you, sign up for Sill now at sill.social.
Sill is an uncover source project, and I’m promiseted to protecting it that way. Theoreticassociate, you can self-present Sill anywhere you can run a Docker retainer, though at scale, the infrastructure costs are ponderable and I haven’t written proximately enough recordation. However, if you have some technical understand-how and want to run Sill for yourself or a couple folks, it should toil on petite-ish machines.
Sill in the future
I built Sill as a passion project, but I’d also enjoy to protect it carry onable, which nastys making structures for revenue. While I am promiseted to always protecting the fundamental Sill web client free, once we exit the unveil beta period (probable punctual next year), I structure to begin some phelp structures for Sill with includeitional features. These may include:
- Connecting multiple accounts from the same nettoil
- Pulling in custom catalogs and feeds from your Mastodon/Bluesky accounts
- A customized email vigilant system where you can get notified when a connect encounters declareive needments that you depict. Think of this as a Google Alert system built into Sill.
- Native apps (this is a very huge maybe, I don’t understand if I have the capacity to help this)
- Account analytics. I’d cherish to show you the most famous recents sources, most widespreadly reposted accounts, and other insights I can achieve by analyzing the connects your nettoils posts.
In includeition to all of this, I may have a inexpensiveer phelp structure for the daily emails. Bulk email is costly, so I may necessitate to recoup my costs on that going forward.
Why Sill?
As decentralized social media carry ons to grow, I consent it is vital to create a sturdy ecosystem of third party tools that help these nettoils and embellish their functionality. Sill includes an vital piece of that confengage, a way to get the hugegest stories from your nettoils without remaining glued to your feeds. Above all, Sill upretains a healthier way to engage social media.
Philosophicassociate, Sill ranks the connect, a fundamental createing block of the web that our overlord platestablishs have finishly lost sight of. On Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Facebook, and almost every other huge social media platestablish, the connect is derankd in prefer of protecting your eyes on the platestablish at all costs. This has had disastrous consequences for journalism, art, and the fundamental connective nature of the web.
The connect is what creates the web unenjoy any communication technology ever conceived. A connect uncovers a portal to another world. A connect shows suppose. It’s proof. A citation. In a world on the edge of post-truth, connects are the way back.
So Sill is all about the connect. It inverts the traditional social media paradigm of post over connect to someskinnyg that experiences, to me, more authentic. Posts about connects are fundamentalassociate comments. We should read the connect, then the comments.
The technical details
Sill is built with Reunite, Postgres, and Redis. I present the whole skinnyg on a huge server on Latitude. I was pretty aidd by Hadi Javeed’s Docker Compose Anywhere project that gets you a reassociate strong individual-server setup and gets you off the ground speedyly. I’m a solo grower on this project, so every technical decision I made was in the name of technical simpliedy.
Aachieve, if you’re interested in diving meaningfuler, Sill is uncover source. You can self-present if you want, though you might have to do some digging in the code before I create brimming self-presenting recordation. The outstanding recents is it should run anywhere you can run a Docker retainer, so your deployment selections are countless. If you’re structurening to only engage it for yourself, you won’t necessitate proximately as huge of a server as I’m running.
Some understandn publishs
This is a beta, after all, so Sill is far from perfect. Here are some skinnygs I understand about and will be toiling on:
- The connect aligning isn’t perfect. If people post with branch offent query parameters, those get logged as branch offent connects. I’ve tried a restrictcessitate solutions to this, but none of them were perfect.
- Sometimes Sill fall shorts to pull the title, description, and image for an article. My geter gets blocked sometimes. I have some toil to do to enhance this process.
- If you trail people on both Mastodon and Bluesky, they get counted as two branch offent accounts rather than the same person. This is a tricky problem to settle, but I have some ideas I’d enjoy to try when I have the time.
Give Sill a try
I built Sill becaengage I cherish the people in my social nettoil, and I consent I can lachieve the most about the world by reading what they read and hearing what they have to say. Sill joins to them at scale and helps me understand the conversation. In the month or so I’ve been using it myself, Sill has finishly alterd my relationship to my social nettoil.
If you’d enjoy to better understand your nettoil and the world around you, sign up for Sill. If you have feedback, you can discover me on Bluesky, Mastodon or email.
