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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.
This would require a fediverse platform that has a built-in, accurate tagging system. So no under that basis.
Keyword blocking works on piefed. As long as people add image descriptions, it works well even on the meme communities.
Here's hoping keyword blocking hits Lemmy/my instance is able to facilitate its planned switch to PieFed without a hitch in the future. I used that feature extensively on Reddit (with RES) to great success and with minimal effort.
However, I'm not a fan of crowdsourced tagging. Topic tagging is significantly more subjective than e.g. the functionality provided by crowdsourced extensions like SponsorBlock.
I feel that crowdsourced tagging will likely reduce/fragment engagement if shared blocklists become widely adopted. I can easily imagine somebody tagging something inappropriately to soft-censor certain posts to groups of users... there are many scenarios that this could be abused if improperly designed or implemented.
There is an argument to made towards making post/community-level flairs a thing and allowing blocking from that. There could also be basic/broad meta-level flairs (e.g. Photo, Video, Meme, Discussion, etc.) that could also be used to filter content.
I don't feel something like crowdsourced tagging would work for the Fediverse unless it has some sort of approval system built for either post's author or commuity admins (and those are already busy). Otherwise it would be far too easy to do things like brigading, or pushing government-style "self-censorship" (or straight out censorship of others: just get an army of ~~bots~~ "volunteers" into one instance, let the resulting blocks federate). Something closer to AO3 style tagging, where the author retains most control but readers can add tags to things that are valid only to them (and maybe to people they share data with too?) should workbetter IMO.
Blocking keywords is not reliable to block topics because a keyword does not a topic make, for example in this post I mention queer, socialism, musk and islam yet it's not topical to any of those things.
I think moderating tags is the same as moderating any other content. If there's a brigade, you can revert all tag changes made by the brigading users the same way you remove content posted by a user when banning them. That said, the moderation system could be improved. Reddit-style moderation is one of the biggest jokes on the internet.
Mmm not sure how it will be managed. It depends whom you trust.
On our jlai.lu chat (https://jlailu.zulipchat.com/) we have a section that has a list of keyword to remove all post related to MAGA and far right. It gives us a peace of mind and we can purpose our keywords.
Imho, you may suggest a git, put your blocklist and invit some people to edit it. Honnestly, i think it is safer to handle personnaly because you know what's inside. But i may be wrong
Piefed does this. haven't seen any posts about Elon Musk in awhile.
That would be easier implemented with microblogging tagging, and the only thread-based platform that uses tags is Mbin afaik. However, even in it you can't still block tags. Maybe poke the devs of Mbin to implement it?
Does anyone know of software that already provides topic-level blocking out of the box without needing long manual lists?
yep, reddit, facebook, twitter...
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.