Add an option to hide bots' posts

[Sylvhem]

I think it should be useful to add an option to the local and global timelines to not display posts made by bots (aka. users who have the "service" Actor type).

EDIT: Actually, it may be good to have that on the home timeline too. It will allow people to follow bots but only display them into specific lists.

---

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

[Xkeeper0]

Crossrefing this with #8347 !

[trwnh]

I think filtering someone out of home/lists separately is a different issue altogether. There's a use case in filtering stuff out of Home but not in a List, or filtering stuff in a List but not in Home...

...actually, I just realized that particular behavior is a subset of bringing back per-column filters. I'll tag the relevant issues later when I get to a computer...

[roipoussiere]

...actually, I just realized that particular behavior is a subset of bringing back per-column filters.

Not for me. Do you refer to #5010 (and similar)? Because per-column filters is a way to get specific contents, while this issue concerns the ability to avoid specific content.

[johanbove]

I'm totally for more granular control over bots posting in our Mastodon instances. I would like to see a general filter option to control (See https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/8347#issuecomment-414824194) if I, as a Mastodonian interested in getting in touch with people, be able to turn off ALL bot posts. Most of the current Bot posts are essentially RSS feed reposts which are flooding the federated timeline. If a Mastodonian had the ability to filter out all Bot users, the Federated timeline would become useful again, even on the biggests Mastodon instances.

[Cassolotl]

There is a pull request for this that was opened in July 2019, #11272, which was approved 12 days ago and is just waiting on being merged by Gargron.

[umonaca]

PR #11272 and PR #10718 are related to this issue. They implement in different ways and both has some kind of unfixed bugs or problems.

[matt-y]

@umonaca It seems both of those PRs have been closed by a bot, ironically.

I'd really like to see this feature get added, however two competing pull requests for the same issue that both perform filtering differently from one another is not going to be helpful in doing so. I think some direction on the preferred approach from the project maintainers is needed here.

[Cassolotl]

I think some direction on the preferred approach from the project maintainers is needed here.

CC @Gargron @ThibG ?

[Cassolotl]

At least two PRs have been written for this and then closed. Is this feature something that you'd like to add, @Gargron? Can you provide some guidance as to how someone might go about it in a way that you'd like, so that someone can submit a PR that has a chance of being accepted?

[FinecoFinit]

This issue was started in 2018 and to this day there is no solution?

[drequivalent]

How is this still open

[Cassolotl]

@drequivalent Do you mean "why hasn't this clearly excellent feature been made yet" or "why hasn't this obviously rubbish feature request been closed yet?"

Anyway, there are lots of issues on this list that have been open for years.

[janmechtel]

I'm considering to work on this. But it would be my first contribution here. Is somebody still interested and would explore together?

[LarsFosdal]

Personally - as a user of Mastodon - being able to hide or channel bots into separate streams would be very welcome.

[mattinatux]

I would also appreciate this dev.

I found this issue by searching mastodon show in lists hide in home. I definitely would love to separate these contexts (from the Dealing with Unwanted Content doc):

• Home timeline and lists = matching statuses will be removed from your home feed and lists

[ajnuss]

Here to add my name to the list of people who would like to see a way to hide bot accounts. It seems a logical addition since there is already a way to flag and identify the accounts, and there is a filter function in the app. Adding a checkbox to the Filters page to filter accounts flagged as Bot should be extremely easy to implement. I am in agreement with those perplexed why this hasn't been done since it was first reported in 2018.

[janmechtel]

This became a lot less relevant for me since I stopped using the federated timeline and just focus on following hashtags, but maybe that's particular to the hashtags I'm following. There are simply not that many bots?

[RasheedAZ]

Please implement this. Federated timelines are almost entirely dominated by bots.

[TicTac9k1]

Yeah for federated timelines bots are not something I want to see. Makes sense when you follow a particular bot, but when it comes to finding valuable new accounts they get buried under in the federated timeline. A secondary request is having a way to slow down the update speed of the timeline. I don't mind it being automated, but the frequency of it refreshing makes it a little distracting.

[davidmegginson]

Bump. Blocking the #bot hashtag isn't enough, because bot accounts don't use it consistently. We really need a one-click option to mute all automated accounts. I don't want bots to be part of my fediverse experience.

[jschmidt]

I'd love to see this. Tired of muting dozens of bots on various timelines.

[kartikynwa]

Bots make federated timeline unusable. Please implement this feature.

[davidmegginson]

The same applies to following hashtags. Some bots just flood them.