Mastodon: Time-based blocking

[taoeffect]

Mastodon has an opportunity to do blocking better with time-based blocks.

Block for: [1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year...]

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• [x] I searched or browsed the repo’s other issues to ensure this is not a duplicate.

[expenses]

That sounds like a great idea. You could have an input for a number and then the enum (hour(s), day(s), week(s), month(s), year(s), forever).

[FerdiFZ]

If/when time-based blocking does get implemented, I think it would be a good idea to also implement time-based muting.

...Also to quote Chris Martin at our discussion over at Mastodon yesterday, _“A temporary block feature would nicely deal with the big difference between ‘you need to stop talking to me right now’ and ‘I wish you didn't exist anymore’”_

[deutrino]

What differences do you see between time-based blocking and time-based muting?

As a user:

• I want to be able to mute other users for a set time period (e.g. 1, 3, 5, 8, 12, 24, 48 hours)
• I want to be able to mute a thread for a set time period (see above)

Potential thorny question: should toots affected by the timed mute reappear after the mute has expired? I say yes.

[taoeffect]

What differences do you see between time-based blocking and time-based muting?

Well, as you mentioned, there are two different kinds of muting, one is muting a user, and another is muting a thread.

I personally feel that both should be treated the same. I would be curious to know if someone replies to a thread 3 months after it's over (it's just a rare thing, so clearly something new has happened).

Potential thorny question: should toots affected by the timed mute reappear after the mute has expired? I say yes.

Reappear where, in your notifications? I think that would defeat the purpose of a muted thread or a muted user, so IMO no. Only new tweets once the timer has expired should appear in notifications.

Otherwise, you might get like 200 notifications all at once. Plus it would probably be difficult to keep track of such things from a programming point of view, resulting in even greater memory/space usage.

[deutrino]

Reappear in the timeline. Not in notifications! :)

Just to clarify further my understanding - are you asking for muting only of notifications, or muting in the sense that the toots themselves are not visible for the duration of the mute?

[taoeffect]

Just to clarify further my understanding - are you asking for muting only of notifications, or muting in the sense that the toots themselves are not visible for the duration of the mute?

I was asking for a timed blocking feature (I never use mute). But I suppose the mute would be just like a regular mute (whatever it currently does), except that after a timeout, the system will automatically unmute them for you. So literally no different than you umuting them yourself after the timeout, except automated.

[jmfcodes]

temporary blocking: forced unfollow, severs user's connection to the blocked account
temporary muting: user's TL hides all toots and interactions from the muted account

both would be really useful.

[inmysocks]

I would greatly appreciate this feature, it is the most common thing that I want to have in mastodon that isn't there.

[chao-master]

Heavy support, I often ran into issues on twitter where I would mute people due to events (april fools day was a big one, I am not a big april's fool fan) then forget to remove it.