Disconnect All Your Friends Who Have Nasty Solutions
We didn’t even go a full week in January, but chances are there is someone on your schedule with a New Year’s resolution that they just won’t be silent about. Don’t remove them from your friends – they will bounce back in a month or so. For this, a 30-day silence was created.
Muting is different from blocking. When you disconnect someone, you are still connected (as friends or subscribers), so you can still send DM to each other and so on. Nothing really changes – except that their posts are simply missing from your timeline. They won’t even know that you turned them off. The controls for this are pretty easy to find. For instance:
- On Facebook, click the arrow at the top of the person’s post and select “Snooze [friend] for 30 days.”
- On Instagram, tap the three dots at the top of the post and select Disable. You will have a choice: to mute the sound in this person’s messages or in his messages and their stories.
- On Twitter, use the arrow at the top of a message to mute that person. (Disabling “conversation” only disables the notifications in which you are tagged, so unfortunately this will not make individual threads disappear.)
- Disable entire categories of Twitter permissions by disabling a keyword (such as # Whole30) for 30 days. Or 7 days if you expect it to fizzle out quickly.
Some platforms allow you to mute a person or a keyword for a specific period of time, such as 30 days; for others, you’ll have to manually turn on the sound. So, while you clear your feed, set a calendar reminder to come back and turn everyone on on February 1st.