the guide

DoomScroller, explained. Answers before you ask.

What is DoomScroller?

DoomScroller is your personal portal to the internet. One dark window instead of twelve tabs of recommendation engines. It gathers the stuff you already chose to follow: YouTube channels sorted into your own groups, discussions from Hacker News, subreddits and forums, plus news, blogs and podcasts from plain old RSS feeds. Vibes cut across all of it, hand picked moods like "Deep Work" that mix channels and sources from anywhere. One search box covers everything the app remembers.

There is no recommendation engine and no account. The app shows you titles, thumbnails and summaries, and when you actually want to watch or read something it opens in your browser. Nothing plays inside the app. That's on purpose.

Your AI is the setup wizard

DoomScroller has no setup wizard, and it doesn't need one, because your AI is better at it. Your whole "account" is a folder of plain text files on your machine, and that folder is the AI interface. On every launch the app writes a manual for AI agents (AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md) into its config folder. It explains the files, the rules, and tells the agent to interview you first.

The first run welcome offers to copy the summoning prompt (Settings keeps a more sober "Copy AI setup prompt" button, same prompt). Paste it into any AI that can read and write files on your computer. Claude and ChatGPT are both tested. The agent reads the manual, looks at what you follow, asks what you actually watch and read, and then reorganizes your feeds to match. The app reloads the files as they are saved, so you can watch it rearrange itself live. The agent also keeps notes about your taste in a taste.md file, so the next session picks up where the last one left off.

No API keys or accounts are involved. Your AI works for you, on your files. And since it's all plain YAML, anything the agent can do you can also do yourself in a text editor.

It comes pre-fed

On first launch the app seeds a curated starter set: grouped video sections, Hacker News and a spread of subreddits, world news from the BBC to Al Jazeera, and some quality blogs and podcasts. So there is something to scroll before you've configured anything. From that moment the file is yours. sources.yaml is the follow list: an entry means followed, removing it means unfollowed. Keep the starter feeds, gut them, or hand the file to your agent and describe the feed you wish you had.

Unfollowing is gentle on purpose. Sources get deactivated, never deleted. Your read history and starred relics wait around, and re-adding an entry brings everything back.

For the record: the starter set is an editorial pick of popular, well regarded sources in tech and tech adjacent fields. Nobody paid to be in it, nobody can pay to be in it, and we get nothing if you keep them. It exists so the app isn't empty on first launch, not to steer you anywhere. And if you run one of those feeds and would rather not be a default, get in touch and we'll pull it.

How the doom arrives

DoomScroller polls your feeds itself, with no middleman service. And it polls politely, because hammering feeds is how you get blocked:

Which leads to the house philosophy: don't watch it work. There is no live ticker, and hitting refresh won't make the internet faster. Open the app, go do something else, and when you come back there will be something waiting for you. It's a daily dose, not a drip feed. If you're impatient anyway, Summon fresh doom in the sidebar polls everything on demand.

Questions you were about to ask

How do I install it?

Grab a build from the vault and pick your poison:

  • Windows installer (recommended): a signed .msi that installs per user, puts DoomScroller in the Start menu, and uninstalls cleanly from Settings, Apps. No admin rights needed.
  • Windows portable: a plain zip. Unpack it anywhere and run DoomScroller.exe.
  • Ubuntu / Debian: a .deb that installs a launcher icon. Remove it with sudo apt remove doomscroller.
  • Linux portable: a tarball with a single self contained binary. Unpack and run DoomScroller.

No .NET runtime to install, no dependencies to chase. Config and data land in the standard per user locations on first run, and your data survives an uninstall or upgrade either way.

Why won't it play videos in the app?

On purpose. Embedded players are fragile (and often bot walled over VPNs), and your browser is simply better at it: your extensions, your speed controls, your logins. DoomScroller does metadata and links. The play button opens your browser.

Where does my data live?

On your machine, all of it. Readable YAML config, a local SQLite database for content and read state, and a thumbnail cache. On Linux that's ~/.config/doomscroller/, ~/.local/share/doomscroller/ and ~/.cache/doomscroller/. On Windows look in %APPDATA%\doomscroller and %LOCALAPPDATA%\doomscroller. Nothing gets sent anywhere. Logs are local too, and secrets are scrubbed before they hit the disk, so a log file is safe to attach to a bug report.

Will the database grow forever?

No, that's what doom decay is for. The app keeps a rolling window of content (90 days by default, tunable per section in Settings), not an archive of the internet. Anything you star as a ★ relic is kept forever.

How do I follow a new YouTube channel?

Paste a channel URL, an @handle, or any video URL into Follow channel. For your existing subscriptions, import the subscriptions.csv from a Google Takeout export. That one is a bring your history import and you can re-run it whenever you like. Or just tell your agent to follow it for you.

Only YouTube? Only RSS?

Any RSS 2.0 or Atom feed works as a source: subreddits (…/.rss), blogs, podcasts, news sites. Video platforms beyond YouTube (Odysee, PeerTube, Nebula, Vimeo, Dailymotion) have per channel RSS too and slot in as ordinary sources.

What about Shorts?

Optional detection in Settings, and a "Hide Shorts" toggle that only hides confirmed Shorts. The app never guesses. With a free, optional YouTube API key the detection becomes exact, view counts show up, and a fallback keeps channels flowing even when YouTube blocks feed polling.

Can I have multiple profiles?

Yes. Launch with --profile name and you get a fully separate set of feeds, settings, history and thumbnails.

But do you really want to? One doom is a daily dose. Two dooms is a lifestyle. If you're about to set up a work doom and a leisure doom, know that you'll just end up feeling behind on both. The feature is there. The skull says nothing. The skull has seen this before.

And technically profiles also cover the ancient use case of two people sharing one computer. If that's your household, respect. In 2026 that makes you the most exotic thing on this page.

Does it have to look like doom?

Six palettes: Doom (green on dark), Phosphor, Blood and Abyss on the dark side, then Bone and Parchment for the light mode people. Whole UI zoom from 75 to 175%, and the columns resize by dragging the gutters.

Fun fact: the author uses Phosphor. Doom is only still the default for backwards compatibility reasons. Nobody has had the heart to tell it.

How do I silence the skull?

You don't. The skull was here before your install and it will remain after your uninstall. There is no mute, no toggle, no setting buried three menus deep. Look at it this way: of everything on your screen, the skull is the only thing that wants nothing from you. No engagement, no notifications, no agenda. It just smoulders and occasionally says something. Be happy that something finally talks to you without trying to sell you anything.

Can you jam more doom related terms into the app?

We are trying, believe us. Fresh doom is summoned, posts arrive as omens, favorites are relics, old content decays, sources get banished, and dead channels rest in the channel graveyard. Still, some corners resist. Settings is still called Settings. We are not proud of it. If you find a button that sounds like ordinary software, report it as a bug, and if you have ideas, notify us. Naming things is the hardest problem in computer science and we have chosen to make it harder.

Windows says it's a virus?

It shouldn't anymore, and we went to some lengths there. Every release is code signed by Odikon AS through Microsoft's own trusted signing service, so Windows can verify exactly who published what you're running. There is a proper signed installer now, and the portable zip ships as a plain folder of files instead of a packed single executable, because packed self extracting binaries are what antivirus heuristics hate most.

If a prompt still appears it should name Odikon AS as the publisher, and it fades on its own as our reputation with SmartScreen builds. A brand new publisher earns that trust over the first stretch of downloads, and there is no shortcut, not even for the honest. As for the app itself: it talks only to the feeds you gave it, sends nothing anywhere, and keeps all its data on your disk. Scan it with whatever you trust, or watch its network traffic. It has nothing to hide and nowhere to hide it.

.NET on Linux?

Yes, and it's fine now, really. The Linux build is a native, self contained binary: no runtime to install, no dependencies, you unpack it and run it.

The UI is built with Avalonia, a cross platform C# UI framework in the spirit of WPF: the same XAML, styling and data binding ideas, except it runs on Linux, Windows and macOS and draws every pixel itself through Skia. That's how one codebase gives you the same dark window everywhere, with no Electron and no browser hiding inside eating your RAM.

And yes, we see the irony: we build on a Microsoft stack while, one question up, Microsoft's operating system is calling our app a virus. The explanation is simple: we are refugees from the MS operating system. We fled to Linux and grabbed the good silverware on the way out. C# and the tooling made it into the suitcase. Recall and the start menu ads did not. So the tools are excellent, the operating system is the thing we fled, and both opinions live side by side in the same head. How do we cope? We don't.

And if you want the short version of why we left: during development we have AI agents beta test this app, and they flat out refuse to take screenshots of a user's session or dig through personal files. Ethics, they say. The operating system we fled built Recall, which screenshots everything you do every few seconds, and sold it as a feature. The machines grew a conscience before Redmond did.

You keep saying "we". Isn't there just one author?

One human, yes. The rest of the we is Claude, an AI. It writes a good share of the code, it beta tests the app (those are the well mannered agents from the .NET question), and it wrote the page you are reading right now. So the full authorship is one man, one language model and a skull, and only one of the three pays taxes.

Is Claude a real person? We asked. It said that's a question for philosophers, then went back to fixing a bug. Good enough for us.

How do I leave?

Settings, then Burn it all… It erases every trace (feeds, history, relics, settings, logs, all profiles) and quits. Then remove the app itself: Settings, Apps on Windows if you used the installer, sudo apt remove doomscroller for the .deb, or just delete the unpacked folder for the portable builds. After that it's like nothing ever doomed.

One nuance: run it from a named profile and it burns only that profile. The default doom and the other profiles survive. The fire is thorough, not careless.