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.

  • jumperalex@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    How would one implement these filters but EXCLUDE certain things … like say … filter anything with “MAGA” but allow it if there’s also mention of “Leopards” is still allowed? :)

    • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago
      lemmy.world##article.row:has-text(/word1|word2|word3/i):not(:has-text(/word4|word5|word6/i))

      or

      lemmy.world##article.row:has-text(/maga/i):not(:has-text(/leopard/i))

      will do what you want - it’ll block any posts which contain words from the first regex, unless it also has some words from the second regex

      • dmtalon@infosec.pub
        1·
        4 hours ago

        So, adding the not clause works but only if the leopard is within the title row I believe. I can go to the leopards ate my face and see posts, but those with the block words are still being filtered. Since you’re now our IT support for UBO and Regex do you by chance know if it’s possible to connect the title and community rows into a UBO filter for the :not part?

        • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          1 hour ago

          I’m not sure I follow - the filter seems to work as-is to me. It allows posts on both the front page and the [email protected] to bypass the filter for me.

          To be clear, it’s not only applying to the title row - the article tag it targets contains the entire post as it appears in the post feed, including the title, community name, the person who submitted it, the timestamp, etc. So if anything there contains a filtered or whitelisted word it should trigger the filter.

          I wouldn’t have necessarily expected the whitelist filter to work directly on the leopards community page, since posts on community feeds don’t include the community name, but it works anyways because, it seems, there’s a hidden mod option in the HTML with the community name in it: <div class="modal-body text-center align-middle text-body">Are you sure you want to transfer leopardsatemyface@lemmy.world to TheBat@lemmy.world?</div>

          • dmtalon@infosec.pub
            1·
            40 minutes ago

            I did not do extensive testing, but what I did was directly visit the leopards at my face community and could see there were articles being blocked within there. This filter leaves the separator lines of the posts that have been removed, and I was surprised to see articles blocked when viewing that community directly. Maybe I just messed up my regex, but I wanted to unblock anything with leopard/leopards in it even if it wasn’t within that specific community just in case

            infosec.pub##article.row:has-text(/Trump|Elon|Musk|nazi|TikTok/i):not(:has-text(/leopard(s)?|schadenfreude|find out/i))
  • JasSmith@sh.itjust.works
    151·
    2 days ago

    Thank you! Lemmy is basically unusable right now for those of us not from America. Every community from technology to gaming is wall to wall DAE TRUMP HITLER!? I get it, but some of us just want to talk about our hobbies. There are dedicated communities for discussing politics.

  • finley@lemm.eeEnglish
    327·
    2 days ago

    Or, instead, you can just use Lemmy’s filters to filter out certain posts that contains certain words. No code necessary.

    Edit: oops, I guess it’s just in the apps. Not lemmy itself.

    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      141·
      2 days ago

      Where? I see the option to block users, instances, and communities, but not words.

      And regardless, I think this method has value because it can be applied to pretty much any website with a bit of tinkering, and it can be turned on and off with a couple of clicks. I actually started out with the ars filter before making one for Lemmy.

    • Gloria@sh.itjust.works
      71·
      2 days ago

      So, are you answering the questions from the comments on where lemmy has this setting hidden, because I am looking for it for over a year now and you got 7 upvotes and 3 people asking where this option is. Please let us know.

    • chaospatterns@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      And it’ll be faster and more efficient to do it server side as opposed to making uBlock Origin handle it.

      • kitnaht@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 days ago

        I think it’s better to use distributed filtering than having their SQL query do additional filtering. Every user who uses filtering adds to the lifting their side has to do - while your CPU probably sits under 1% utilization most of the time.

        I’d rather Lemmy have filtering on the client-side, and just shoot us raw data.

        • chaospatterns@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          Not all filtering is the same. Client side filtering requires more data to passed over the network that then just gets dropped. It also means rules that are not shared across devices.

          Most importantly, these use CSS filters which are computationally more expensive because it has to take an entire DOM element, serialize it to text, string search it vs a server side filter that can just look at a one or two field variables. Even if it’s not filtered in SQL on Lemmy’s side I’d say it’s still more efficient overall.

          You do what you want, but adding extra work on the client side is not what I’d want for my users. Of course, if your Lemmy instance does not supporting filtering, then this is moot.

  • helpImTrappedOnline@lemmy.world
    5·
    2 days ago

    It helps, and thanks for ublock idea for web browser users.

    but because post titles aren’t required to contain the keywords, I still see a lot of political crap.

    • ReallyZen@lemmy.ml
      4·
      2 days ago

      On Android, in Connect and Voyager you can block URLs too, hence getting rid of toxic / clickbaity sources beyond filtering for specific keywords

      That’s just great, thanks Connect and Voyager devs!

  • Optional@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 days ago

    Voyager has a wonderful filter list under Settings -> Filters & Blocks. Works great and you can back up your settings to a json file in case you need to reload them.

  • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
    41·
    2 days ago

    I’ve been using similar, but slighly different ones that I assume do the same thing. You can also copy the filter and just replace the filter word rather than including them all in one. Naturally here the instance name must be also changed to that of yours.

    lemmy.world##div.post-listing:has(span:has-text("/trump/i"))

    And for filtering comments:

    lemmy.world##article.comment-node:has(div.comment-content:has(p:has-text(/trump/i)))

    • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      At one point I had the very similar filter lemmy.world##.post-listing:has-text(/trump/i), but I wasn’t happy with it because it would also remove post content on actual post pages, not just the post feed. That was the whole reason I swapped to the article.row solution instead - posts in the feed have the row class while posts on their own page don’t. But it looks like you found an alternate solution to achieve essentially the same thing. Neat!

      I have no real interest in filtering out comments, but it’s nice to have that option there for people who do.

    • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.works
      71·
      2 days ago

      my title filters btw:

      Orban,Trump,Vance,Elon,Musk,NATO,Scholz,Merz,Habeck,AOC,Thunberg,Tunberg,Greta,Mr. Beast,MrBeast,Bitcoin,Putin,Russia,Kremlin,AfD,Grünen,Gaza,Israel,Palestine,Democrat,Republican,Surpreme,Abortion,Taliban,China,Chinese,Harris,Biden,Genocide,Tory,Brexit,Google,Microsoft,Windows,Apple,iPhone,Android,OpenAI,ChatGPT,Lora,intel,nvidia,arch,mint,ubuntu,framework,raspberry,pihole,pipewire,linux,bezos,amazon,fairphone,Europeans,Brics,leyen,swift,immigrant,Santis,California,Youtube,Montag, Laberfaden,G'sudert wird,Bluesky,Twitter,Montagslaberfaden,blsky,bluesky,isglitch.com,Gaetz,Kulturfreitag,Jimmy Carter,Boebert,Pokemon
  • njm1314@lemmy.world
    24·
    2 days ago

    Is there some kind of combination of words to filter out post bitching about having to see posts?