What does it mean to "Mute" someone on Social Media?
To mute is an action available on social media websites that is similar to blocking, but that doesn't prevent the muted person from sending messages to you. That is, when you block an user in a social network, they can't send messages to you, and you can't see their posts. When you mute someone, their posts won't appear anymore for you, but they can still send messages to you.
What Social Media Allow Muting Users?
Muting users is an ability available on Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky.
What is the Purpose of Silencing an User Instead of Blocking?
On platforms that allow muting and blocking users, you would block users that send unpleasant messages to you, like spam. This would prevent them from talking to you or in some cases from viewing your profile. You would mute users whose posts appear in your feeds for one reason or another but that never post anything that interest you, e.g. if they post on a hashtag that you follow.
For example, suppose you search for the hashtag #orchids on Twitter, or follow the hashtag on Mastodon. Doing this you wanted to see posts about orchids. Suppose that there is an user that has a pet called "Orchids" e every time he talks about the pet he uses the hashtag for his name. You can mute such users that post things that don't interest you to make their posts disappear from various feeds in the platform.
Exceptionally, currently if your mute someone on Bluesky, it doesn't make their posts disappear from search1. Seems to be a bug.
Quotes
Blocked users will not be able to DM you. Muted users are able to DM you.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/05-22-2024-direct-messages (accessed 2024-09-25)
References
- https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/3234 (accessed 2024-09-14) ↩︎
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