Shelter for a hostile information environment
Stop doom scrolling, with topic-based news briefings twice a day from high-quality, reliable sources.
- Humans live in an information ecosystem.
- That ecosystem is shaped by an information environment.
- Our information environment has been rapidly changing.
- We produce, consume and distribute information in ways never seen before.
- The tools we’ve built to adjust don’t always work with our wellbeing in mind.
- We live in a hostile information environment.
- What should you do in a hostile environment?
Seek Shelter.
What Shelter is
Shelter is designed to do just enough to help you keep up.
It can’t, and it shouldn’t, try to track the whole internet.
Sources
Sources with a reason to be reliable.
Shelter works by curating high-quality sources that we think do a good job of managing editorial judgement with competing incentives.
We prioritise sources that have a reason to be as reliable as possible. By this, we mean they have some kind of long-term incentive to maintain their reputation, to maintain their integrity, and to protect their relationship of trust with their readers.
At the moment, this means RSS feeds, newsletters and podcasts from sources that are worth letting in from outside into your Shelter.
Just like your own home, you decide who and what comes in, and it’s built for that purpose.
How it works
Once or twice a day is enough.
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1
Describe your topics
When you log in, create some topics with a simple sentence or two.
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2
We filter for you
We’ll use these topics to filter from the wider information environment.
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3
A briefing twice a day
Then, twice a day, we prepare a topic summary that keeps you aware of what’s relevant.
You can tweak your settings over time, but you won’t have to keep checking more than once or twice a day.
What happens in between
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Read in full where possible
Shelter fetches each article in full where it can. When one is paywalled or blocked it works from what it could read and says so. It never passes off a headline as the story.
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Weighed against your topics
AI rates how well each article fits each of your topics, and your relevance setting decides how close the fit must be. A story goes under the one topic it fits best, with a note where it touches your others.
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Grouped and sourced
When five outlets report the same thing, you see one story with the other coverage beneath it. Every point in a summary links to the publication it came from, added by Shelter from what it stored, not made up by the AI.
The briefing
Written for reading, not scrolling.
- Summary The main threads across all your topics, in a few paragraphs.
- One page per topic A short account of what happened, then the stories it was written from, each with its other coverage.
- Why this is here On every story: how well it fit, the reason it was given, how it was found and how much of it was read.
- Signals What the briefing was made from: how many articles and sources, how much was read in full, and how many were set aside.
- Listen A spoken edition of each briefing, if you want one.
The government confirmed the emissions plan will keep its 2030 target but delay the agricultural pricing scheme by two years (RNZ). Farm groups welcomed the delay, while two climate scientists said it pushes the hardest cuts onto the next decade (The Spinoff).
Stories
Emissions plan keeps 2030 target, delays farm pricing
RNZ · also covered by Stuff, NZ Herald
Scientists warn delay shifts burden to the 2030s
The Spinoff · read in full
Spoken briefings
Read it, listen, or both.
Turn on Spoken Briefings and each briefing also comes in a version written to be heard, read aloud by a natural voice. It isn’t the written briefing read out: it is written for the ear, from the same sources, and it keeps playing with your phone locked.
Your written briefing stays exactly as it is.
12 min to listen
- Summary2:40
- Climate policy3:10
- New Zealand politics3:05
- AI and work2:50
Settings
Briefings the way you like to read.
Start with the defaults and adjust as you go. Changes apply from your next briefing.
Relevance threshold
How closely a story has to fit one of your topics to make it in.
Stories per topic
How many stories each topic can hold in a briefing.
Tone
How the summaries are written.
Length
How much each summary says.
Format
Paragraphs, or something to skim.
Schedule and sources
Morning and evening briefings at times you choose, in your timezone, or none at all and updates when you ask. Turn off any feed or publisher you don’t want.
Trust
Built to earn your trust.
Your judgement wins
Mark a story Good match or Not a match, or move it to another topic. Shelter learns from it, and your decision is never overwritten by the machine’s.
Honest about what it read
Every story says whether Shelter read the full article, an excerpt or only a headline. Summaries are only written from what was actually read.
AI can be wrong
Summaries are written by AI and can make mistakes. That is why every point links to its source and every story shows why it was chosen.
Plain about privacy
Shelter runs on one server, run by its operator. It uses AI models hosted by OpenRouter, so your topics, feedback and briefing material are sent to them; spoken briefings are read aloud by ElevenLabs. The operator can see your topics and briefings; other readers cannot. There are no ads and nothing is sold.
Limited beta
Shelter is available for limited beta testing.
It’s a small, early project. Beta readers use the iPhone app through TestFlight.
Tell us a bit about yourself and why you’d like to try it. If there’s room, you’ll get a TestFlight invitation and a temporary password, and the app introduces itself the first time you sign in.
Seek Shelter.
Contact
Get in touch.
A question, a source worth letting in, or something that isn’t working? Send a message here, or email contact@shel7er.com.