Why YSK: Certain topics are stressful and tend to spread all over the site, including to unrelated communities. Blocking communities can be overkill and ineffective, and likewise for blocking individual users.

To do so, open up the uBlock Origin dashboard, go to the ‘My filters’ tab, and add this filter:

lemmy.world##article.row:has-text(/word1|word2|word3|word4/i)

For example:

lemmy.world##article.row:has-text(/Trump|Elon|Musk|nazi/i)

Then apply the changes and reload any open tabs, and all posts which contain any of your filtered words will simply not show up.

You’ll have to change “lemmy.world” at the start to whatever your actual instance is. You can filter as many or as few words as you want, just keep the / at the start, the /i at the end, and separate words with | pipes. What’s actually being filtered is a case-insensitive regex, if you want to get fancy with it.

Here are equivalent filters for reddit and Ars Technica:

reddit.com##div.thing[data-context="listing"]:has-text(/word1|word2|word3|word4/i)
arstechnica.com##article:has-text(/word1|word2|word3|word4/i)

As a disclaimer, I made these myself, and I’m not particularly familiar with creating uBlock Origin filters. There may be better ways to do this. Also the reddit one is specific to old.reddit.com, and the lemmy filter is made to work with the default lemmy.world web UI and may not work on other UIs without tinkering.

Yes, I know I’m just hiding my head in the sand.

  • zkfcfbzrOP
    link
    English
    21 day ago

    I think I may see why. I didn’t actually bother to check the main feed before, but it seems like it does have the a.community-link tag the new filter targets in every post - so if a post from leopardsatemyface ever shows up in the main feed, then the filter will think it’s on that community page and fail to block any posts. But the filter should work fine so long as no posts from that community are currently on the main feed. This should be the case regardless of which regex is used - if it wasn’t just a coincidence earlier I’ll have to test around to figure out what happened with that.

    It’s a process making a good filter, I guess - I may look into a more reliable and narrower way to achieve the desired effect later on