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Ability to filter posts based on content in the actual body of the post

It would be nice to have the ability to hide posts with certain words that may be in the body of the post but not in the tags or content warnings. Unless I'm mistaken, it seems like right now you can only mute certain content warnings or tags which is cool, but it doesn't help if someone doesn't actually tag or CW something, yet posts about it a ton in the actual body of the post.


As an example, I can not have any tags or CWs on my post that is nothing but the word spaghetti copy and pasted 1000 times, and someone with every permutation of the word spaghetti filtered in the settings from CWs and tags and they will still see my post.


65 people like this idea

Agreed, this would be especially good for long discussions in which no participant is tagging their reblogs. It'd be nice to have the option to filter by regex, too, but I think even basic post body filtering is a pretty important feature.


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Bonus feature: the reverse of twitter's 'Trending', to make temporarily avoiding the latest subject of discourse super easy.


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THIS is one of the biggest features cohost is missing for me. i'm amazed it didnt occur to me until just reading this.


not everyone is gonna tag their posts 100% effectively, if at all, and the same issue goes for content warnings. content filters would be the perfect "last barrier" to go along tag filters and content warning filters.


8 people like this

just came here to suggest this!


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Tagging extensively is laborious and usually only done by people who are trying to improve discoverability of their posts, not just express something that may or may not disturb/annoy others. Sometimes people don't even know that what they are expressing could be disturbing or annoying or any other kind of thing that someone might want to filter out. This feature would both reduce the toil and the burden of cultural context/emotional foresight for posters, and would improve reader's experiences. This makes the site more inviting to those who want to avoid seeing undesirable content in what is ultimately supposed to be a general-purpose social gathering center where many different things–not all of which they are interested in or want to be exposed to-are going to be present. All in all, a great suggestion!


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 I was going to suggest this myself. I have PTSD triggers that are not generally tagged or warned for, so the existing filtering tools aren't particularly useful. I hope this feature gets added eventually.


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This is one of my pet peeves too. The content I find annoying isn't always tagged. There are absolutely certain phrases I would mute if I could.


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came here to suggest this as well! i find that while tagging works and helps to a certain extent, the ability to hide a post based off of the usage of a specific word would also be helpful in addition to being able to filter out tags (especially in a chain of reblogs like someone else mentioned where not every reblog is being tagged). i think this also makes the site more accessible with regard to a trigger standpoint


2 people like this
yeah, after a seamless “completely hiding all content relating to (political figures A and B)” on mastodon today, it’s pretty unpleasant to be back to being unable to filter posts that aren’t tagged at all, and not being able to fully hide posts that are “only” tagged and aren’t cw’d. tags also being discoverability really discourages the use of them for “things people might want to filter”.

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@JackDotJS you misunderstood the person above you, I think. I use tags for things that are kind of inoffensive, like minor spoilers for games that are several years old: I don't want to cover up my posts in CWs for those, so I tag them with `minor spoilers` or whatever. But I'm only doing this because I want people to be able to filter my posts out, not discover them through those specific content tags, and I'm doing it because I HAVE to if I want to be courteous to others while also not making my posts look like a hazard zone. Imagine if half of the stuff on the site had CWs on them so you'd be constantly clicking through to see posts; you'd get quite annoyed with the browsing experience, wouldn't you?


Anyway, don't jump down other people's throats in support threads, please!

i just thought it was weird, jfc. sorry for offending you all?????????

coming here to bump this since people are Not Great at tagging their posts... at all, which entirely defeats the purpose of tag muffling

being able to muffle based on post content would be a blessing

1 person likes this
Yes

A lot of people, myself included, deliberately do not tag things because they don't want those posts coming up in tag searches. I use content warnings, yes -- but not everyone does. In particular there is content that I do not ever want to be exposed to that is almost never tagged or content-warned; it's just suddenly there with no warning.


If we could block words instead of just tags, it would be so much more effective at allowing us to moderate the content we see.

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