There should be a Fediverse platform that makes blocking entire topics as easy as blocking a tag, not subscribing/unsubscribing dozens of communities. Firefish (antennas) and PieFed let you follow/block keywords, but that’s not the same as robust, community-wide topic blocking. Imagine collaborative, booru-style tagging across posts so blocking a tag reliably removes all content using it. Does anyone know of software that already provides topic-level blocking out of the box without needing long manual lists?
You don’t seem to get my point. For a platform to let me reliably filter a whole topic, the majority of posts need to be tagged with that topic first. Reddit/Facebook don’t do that, they have communities and loose categories, not consistent topic tags across all posts. Twitter only partially does it with hashtags, and hashtags are neither comprehensive nor applied consistently. I’m talking about platform-level, booru-style or collaborative tagging so blocking a tag actually removes the tagged content without me having to unsubscribe from dozens of communities or build giant keyword lists.
Imo it might be easier to collaboratively build keyword lists. It’s tedious to tag posts manually, and it becomes impossible to do it effectively after the user base grows past a certain point. You can auto-remove any post that isn’t tagged, but a lot of people dislike that kind of filtering and only a few communities would implement something like that
Quora had heckloads of users before the well-working topic system was destroyed with the excuse of tag spamming (real reason: cost-cutting), which us tedium-loving “Topic Gnomes” had always corrected quickly. So it’s not impossible. Now the tagging is done badly by “AI” and my feed content went to shit, even worse than on PieFed with a leaky keyword mute list.
Missing features were a trust system for topic editors (new user = 0 trust, etc.) and answer topic tagging - only the questions were tagged, which didn’t work when the question was general, like “What should you know in 2025?” and the specific answers were all over the place.
Keywords would never have worked for the infinite questions about perpetual motion machines, because the askers never knew the correct term. Similarly, I have failed to craft a keyword block list to filter out all U.S. politics.