mute

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mute is the ability to hide posts in your reader that have specific words, or from particular publishers, sometimes only a specific type or format, optionally with an automatic expiration, after which newer posts are visible again.

IndieWeb Examples

None currently.

Silo Examples

Some silos have a "mute" feature for hiding posts from people so you don't have to see what they post, without having to unfollow them.

Some let you mute some types of posts (reposts, e.g. Twitter retweets) per person
Some let you mute ephemeral vs normal posts (Instagram stories, posts, or both) per person.

Some silos also have the ability to mute whole words or phrases, independent of publisher, with an optional expiration, after which you start seeing new posts with those words again.

Flickr

Flickr - added in 2007? (needs citations, screenshots)

Facebook

Facebook lets a user remove content from their news feed in several ways, all accessible right from a singular post:

Hide post. This allows the user to permanently hide a specific post.
Snooze Author for 30 days. This allows the user to temporarily hide posts from a specific author.
Hide all from Author. This allows the user to permanently hide posts from an author the user isn’t following themselves. The post was put on their timeline by the Facebook Algorithm because a friend interacted with it or shared it.
Unfollow Author. This allows the user to permanently hide posts from an author the user is following. This isn’t “hiding” or “muting” so much as actively unfollowing a feed the user themself previously choose to follow.

Some form of muting has reportedly been available since 2010(?).

Twitter

Twitter - added in 2014 more info

How to mute accounts on Twitter
Mute Tweets that contain particular words, phrases, usernames, emojis, or hashtags more info
Mute a conversation more info
Mute retweets per account: has an option to “not show retweets” from someone you follow (needs screenshot), which you can enable/disable using the "..." button/menu from their profile page. This is essentially a “mute retweets” feature even though they don’t call it that.

Instagram

On the iOS app when viewing someone’s profile that you’re following, you can:

tap on the [ Following v ] button
it reveals a slide up menu from the bottom of the screen which has a "Mute >" item,
tapping "Mute" slides left a submenu of "Posts" and "Stories",
each item has a toggle switch to its right, which you can set independently.

(screenshots needed)

Strava

On the iOS app when viewing someone’s profile that you’re following, you can:

tap on the [ Following v ] button
it reveals a slide up menu from the bottom of the screen which has a "Mute ( )" item with radio button and explanatory text:
- "Hide their activities and posts from your feed. Strava won’t let them know they’re muted."
tapping the item toggles the radio button; checked (white check on a filled in orange background) means you won’t see their activities/posts on your home "Following" feed

(screenshots needed)

Gobo

Gobo is a reader/aggregator that works with Twitter, Facebook, and Mastodon that provides a wide variety of filters within its reader interface that allow users to control, filter, or mute on various criteria including: seriousness, rudeness, brands, coronavirus, gender, obscurity, 2020 US election news.

Past Examples

Quiet Time

Quiet Time by Kyle Mahan was a an open source tool and service for temporarily muting someone on Twitter. It lived at quiettime.xyz.

Flaminga

Flaminga was (site went down ~2014-12) an in-development Twitter client that proposed some elegant solutions to spam and abuse on Twitter.

Shared mute lists. Subscribe to a friend's mute list
Mute tweets from a muted user's followers
Mute tweets that mention you along with a muted third party
Mute brand new users (configurable 1 day to 1 year)
Mute users who post too many repeated links, or who are muted by others

Brainstorming

Alternative to multiple feeds

Mute seems like a much more user-friendly way to provide control to readers of sites over what kinds of content they see from that site in their readers, as compared to having to either choose from or change their minds about which feeds of a site to follow / subscribe to.

Use-case: you want to subscribe to / follow someone’s personal site updates, but there’s either too much there (they post too often), or you’re uninterested in some of their updates in particular, and want a way to only get the updates you want.

A few current sites have different feed files with different subsets of their content for following / subscribing. While this seems like a reasonable solution, it puts a lot of burden on the publisher to both maintain multiple feed files, and have to deliberately consider when they're publishing, which feed files any particular post will be sent to.

Contrary to the "multiple feeds approach", silos (see #Silo_Examples above) have opted for extending the general UI notion of "muting" all of someone’s posts to the ability to "mute" only some of someone’s posts.

Thus using "mute" to solve this use-case instead of multiple feeds seems like a reasonable approach for IndieWeb solutions as well (especially in social readers which have a UI very much like social media for reading feeds/streams, that have mute features).