Muffling and Muting Tweets in Twitterrific (iOS and macOS)

How Does Muffling work in Twitterrific? What's the Difference Between Muffling and Muting?

Muffles are a powerful way to hide certain users, links, hashtags, or keywords from your timeline. The best way to think of them are like lighter versions of muting. Muffling does not remove filtered tweets from your timeline entirely, but instead minimizes them, out of the way of your reading experience. Muffled tweets appear as a single line in your timeline, with a short description of what has been hidden. This lets you to scroll through your filtered timeline while still allowing you to interact with filtered tweets if you wish.

To add a muffle from a tweet, first select a tweet, then simply tap the More Actions button and select the "Muffle..." option from the action sheet. The first step is similar on macOS as well, just look for the Action icon... and click it then select Muffle. From there, select the item in the tweet you wish to muffle. Once this is done, you'll see all tweets containing the item as a single line describing what has been hidden. If you wish to take a peek at a muffled tweet, simply tap on it. You can remove a muffle setting that is hiding a tweet by tapping and holding on the muffled tweet in iOS. On macOS, to remove an existing Muffle, open Twitterrific's Preferences and select the Muffles Tab, select the muffle you want to remove and click delete at the bottom of the window. These muffle settings are account-based and are synced through iCloud between devices running Twitterrific.

You can find and edit the complete list of your current muffles in the Muffles section in the sidebar on iOS or via Preferences on the Mac. If you wish to completely hide a muffle from the timeline on iOS, so it doesn't show up at all, swipe left on the muffle in the list and tap to select the "Mute" option. To delete a muffle in this view, swipe left on it and tap to select the "Delete" option. On the Mac, check the mute checkbox next to an existing muffle to completely hide it in the timeline.

It's important to note that users who have been added as a muffle continue to show their full tweets if they reply to you directly on Twitter. If you don't want to see replies from someone at all then you need to either fully mute or block them. This also keeps any push notifications from these users from being sent to your device.

There are several types of muffle rules for common use-cases that are easily created by adding or editing a rule manually with the Muffles editor:

• Keywords and phrases
  • Muffles of this form are created simply by typing the word or phrase you wish to muffle in the editor.
• Hashtags
  • Enter a single hashtag such as #spoiler
• Specific Twitter Users
  • If you wish to muffle a specific user, simply enter their Twitter screen name in the editor: @someone
• Web Links
  • Tweets with links to specific websites can be muffled by entering the "domain" of the site. For example, to muffle all tweets that include a link to YouTube, simply enter: youtube.com
• Twitter Clients
  • Sometimes there are specific Twitter clients that are used to send automated tweets or to send tweets from other social networks on behalf of the user. Those can be blocked by entering the keyword "via" followed by the name of the client. For example: via facebook
• Tweet Length
  • There are long tweets and short tweets and you can block them however you like. If you wish to ignore tweets that are longer than 140 characters, you can use > 140. If you want to muffle especially short tweets, you can do that with a rule such as < 5. If you want to muffle tweets of a very specific link, you can use a rule in the form of = 100. Sometimes it isn't about the number of characters, but the number of lines. In that case, simply append the word "lines" to your rule and it will count those instead. For example, muffling tweets with more than 3 lines is as simple as > 3 lines
• Mentions
  • Prevent mentions of a specific person with: mentions @someone, or avoid seeing any tweets from @someone that mention anyone else using: @someone mentions. You can even muffle very precise combinations such as all tweets from @someone that also mention @another: @someone mentions @another. You can even muffle all tweets that mention anyone regardless of who sent them: mentions.
• Retweets
  • Muffle all tweets that were retweeted by a person with: @someone retweets, or prevent seeing any retweets of @someone's tweets simply by using this rule: retweets @someone. As with the Mentions rule type, you can also get even more specific: @someone retweets @another. Or you can muffle all retweeted tweets regardless of who sent them or who was retweeted: retweets.
• Quotes
  • Tweets from @someone that quote any other tweet can be muffled using: @someone quotes. Or all quotes of @someone's tweets can be muffled with: quotes @someone. Like the Mentions and Retweets rules, this can also be applied even more specifically: @someone quotes @another. Or it can muffle all quote tweets regardless of who sent them or who was quoted: quotes.

All of the above muffle rules can be further refined so that they only apply to a single user rather everyone in your timeline. This is done simply be rewriting the rule to start with the target user's screen name. For example, if @someone has a habit of posting especially long tweets that you aren't interested in seeing all of the time, you can muffle them with a rule like this: @someone > 190 This will muffle all tweets sent by @someone that are over 190 characters long but leave their shorter tweets fully visible.

You can also hide very complex strings of words, phrases, or patterns from your timeline by using regular expressions. Find out how to create regular expression filters in Twitterrific.