A Guide to Creating Muffles & Mutes in Tapestry

Tapestry's muffle and mute rules are a premium feature that lets you create filters that change what appears (or doesn't appear) in your timeline. They are a great way to avoid movie or TV spoilers, avoid discussions of unwanted topics and more. Muffled items appear in the Tapestry timeline in Mini mode and can be expanded for easy viewing. Mutes are removed from your timeline completely so you never see them in the first place.

Creating the Rule and Adding Keywords:

To get started, head to:

Settings > Muffles & Mutes > + New Rule


 

Tapestry's rules work by looking for keywords in your timeline and then applying the muffle or mute behavior to matching items.

Use + Add Keyword to enter a term you want to filter on. For example:

Musk*

Adding an asterisk at the end of the keyword (as in this example) enables wildcard matching which allows for catching variations like "Musk's" without having to add multiple keyword rules.

Next, choose where Tapestry should look for this term in a timeline item such as the item's title, body text, external links, and even media ALT text descriptions. You can choose as many or as few locations as you wish.

Keywords can also be a phrase consisting of more than one word, however keep in mind that will only match if the entire phrase is detected. If you need to match on a bunch of different keywords, just add multiple keywords to your rule.

Press Add to save the new keyword and continue.

You can add as many keywords as you wish to a single rule to match on several related things without having to make a bunch of different rules. So for example you could add additional keywords such as:

Elon*
DOGE
Tesla*
billionaire

You can set the rule to require ANY or ALL of the keywords by toggling the slider at the top of the Matching list.

When set to ALL, then every keyword listed must be found in an item before it will be considered a match. When set to ANY, only one of the keywords need be found. (If the rule has only a single keyword, then the switch has no effect either way.)

Defining Rule Preferences:

Next, choose what feeds in Tapestry the filter rule will apply to. By default new rules apply to all feeds, but you can override this selection and apply it to a specific subset of feeds if you wish.

Next, select the behavior for the rule. Muffling is the default for how items in the timeline will be shown. Items appear as a minimized entry that can be expanded to read or easily skipped over as you scroll through your timeline. Choosing Mute removes the item from the timeline completely. You can also set the rule to be Inactive if you wish to temporarily disable it without deleting it.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the Rule Name. Giving the rule a descriptive, unique name is an important way to help you know why a particular item is being minimized in the timeline. 



 

Additional Tips & Tricks:

• Muffle and mute rules can be enabled or disabled on a per-timeline basis and don't have to apply across the entire app. To do this, select a timeline and then tap Configure Timeline. Under the Muffle and Mutes section you can turn your rules off for that particular timeline if you don't want them to do their magic.

• All muffle and mute rules are case-insensitive, so there is no need to worry about matching the exact capitalization.

• Don't be afraid to add multiple keywords to your muffle rule, but be aware that if you match on ALL of them, the filter is less likely to catch what you're after unless you are targeting something very specific.

• Experiment with where to look for the keyword within the item for the best result. A great example is to filter the term "boosted" in the Annotation field. This will catch items that are boosted by other people on Mastodon so you can easily ignore or mute them completely if you wish.

• Wildcard matching is not restricted to just the end of the keyword. A * character is allowed anywhere within the keyword and can be thought of as "0 or more non-space characters go here." If you place a * at the beginning of the keyword, it means the keyword can appear alone or with a prefix. Placing the * at the end means the keyword can appear alone, or with a suffix.

• Sometimes using a wildcard can match too much. This is especially true of short words that might also appear within other words. For example, if you tried to muffle "Bob*" to hide posts that say things like, "Bob's so and so...," you may accidentally find you're muffling other things like "bobcat" and "bobsled." In these cases it may be best to fall back to using multiple keywords rather than a single wildcard keyword. In this example, perhaps a rule with two keywords: "bob" and "bob's"

• If you are technically minded, consider writing a regular expression to help craft more complex filter rules. Keywords can be interpreted as a regex by adding slashes before and after when entering a new keyword such as: /key\s*(word|term)s?/

• Plain text keywords are defined as being between "word break" characters. If you are familiar with regular expressions, think of the standard non-wildcard, non-regex keyword as matching with a rule like this: /\bkeyword\b/