In basic terms, I am becoming fed up with the way I interact with social media platforms that have no mute options. It was annoying when I first tried out Threads (they sorted it out quickly), and as we approach another election year in the States, it’s untenable on micro.blog.

At this point, I have been asking for this feature for years. Yes, my preferred app, Gluon, offers it, as does the web interface Lillihub, but when at least a third of my usage involves opening the platforms' homepage on my Mac while working, that donesn’t suit me well.

This wasn’t really an issue when I started asking for it. The small community on micro.blog is niche and nice enough to not have many posts I would rather not see. However, now that I use it to access the wider ActivityPub network, these posts are growing all the time.

The usual pushback on this is, ‘Just mute or block people.’ And while that argument is valid, it doesn’t solve the issue at all. All the people I follow are pleasant; they are not intentionally posting about bad things for attention (mostly). I aim to keep my feed small and curated for this reason, and I follow them because I want to keep up to date with them.

They should be allowed to post about whatever topic they see fit. Topics that affect them, like American politics, religion, and all the other things that I have no interest in, yet dominate my timeline in election years. I post about things that others might not like to see, and they should also be able to block my ramblings about those topics as they see fit.

Yet here we are, years into the platform and still no ability to mute words. As the political posts start to ebb and flow, in the words of Casey Newton, ‘I’ve seen this movie before, and I know how it ends.’ I can’t stand to go through this again, so I must either move to another place entirely or uncouple my blog from social media completely.