Ability to remove a follower #1160
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Hi Just out of curiosity: why would you want to remove a follower but not block them? |
Good question; its more a friend dynamic I've observed on other network occurring at times (not sure it's one I entirely subscribe to myself, but hey ho). They seem to remove people they are ... not talking to ... but are in the same friend circles without outright blocking as it can cause issues on some networks when following conversation threads etc. However, I do fine the lack of automatic removal of follower status upon block unexpected (and unusual) behaviour. |
I agree #1162 |
pfrazee
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This is something we've discussed pretty heavily internally -- we don't yet know how to do it reliably. The issue is that every user controls their own dataset. When I "follow" somebody, what I'm doing is publishing a follow record on my account. When I block somebody, same thing: I publish a block record. A block record can override the behaviors of a follow record, but it can't force-remove the follow record from somebody else's repository. We have discussed a voluntary removal of the follow record. That is, if somebody blocks me, my server automatically deletes my follow record. The only concern is that it's impossible to force. A server that's misbehaving (intentionally or not) wouldn't delete the follow record, so there would be some confusing scenarios where soft-blocks don't work. That led to some discussion of whether we could try to enforce voluntary behaviors by social pressure (eg "Follow the protocol or your server will be penalized") but we haven't established a framework for that kind of governance yet so we're hesitant to move forward with it. A subsequent proposal to require "follow requests" has been discussed (bluesky-social/atproto#1352) which is technically feasible but adds a little more friction than we want for the default model. That leaves us where we currently are, which is tracking these two options but not ready to move on either yet. |
Either the voluntary removal, or an additional record type of a literal soft-block to let you track or flag when a remote account should do that removal next time it refreshes or "sees" the records? Just trying to think about how it all works on the Fediverse, and while the same misbehaving server issue remains there (you will never remove that chance IMO in a distributed environment), but as you can say you can potentially govern on some avenues. |
I agree with the original request although I can't exactly articulate why this is desired vs outright blocking without citing vague concepts like how blocklists are perceived and unnecessary follower association "feels". Not being a public or notable figure it was plainly obvious which accounts were simply engaging in bot-like behaviour or follower-spam and which were genuinely interested in interacting with me and my content. I routinely pruned mass-follow accounts when it made sense, but it was by no means a scientific process. From a day to day perspective there's no difference at all to my bsky experience whether "@buy-bitcoin-cheap-today.bsky.social" follows me or not; they're unlikely to ever actually interact with me in any meaningful way. But when I look at my follower list I see "friend, friend, friend, acquaintance, artist I'm interested in, news org, obvious mass-follow account, friend" and I'm just left with a vague desire to prune. On birdsite it was easy enough to block/unblock, took two seconds and I'd most likely never see the account again, but it sounds like there are technical reasons this may not be feasible here. Leaving a profile on a blocklist I found to have a connotation of engaging in (actively) unacceptable activity and being a profile I really and truly do not wish to interact or be associated with, but again, I can't cite anything other than personal preference on this. If blocking is the best feasible solution to a mass follow profile showing up on my "Followers" list then this is certainly not a hill I'm willing to die on -- I'll be happy to keep blocking mass follow accounts and lump them in with accounts I actively want to prevent interacting with me. No real solutioning in this reply, but hopefully this mirror the way others feel. |
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Yup, pretty much this @littlejackal. As someone with a fairly small account, I like to look at my follower lists / follower count, and see that I'm followed by let's say 200 people who are interested in what I post. Accounts like that anime pictures one that follows 100k profiles obviously aren't reading what I post, so they are just inflating that follower count artificially. This obviously doesn't apply above some level of follower count where looking at the list or even reading follow notifications stops making sense. |
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I added a note to #1161 that "can't become my follower" would be a good setting in such cases. |
as of right now bluesky now has a bot issue because of people posting their invite codes on twitter/x right now you can block followers you don't want accessing your profile but it doesn't completely remove them i think follower removing like twitter/x has would be a great idea so you can keep tabs on real followers and weed out the fake ones |
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+1 Please add the option that let’s you unfollow. |
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Copying here what I wrote on Bluesky about how this could be handled: We could have some additional record type for this purpose, let's say an "unfollow" or "softblock" or "denyFollow" record. This would be like a reverse, negative follow, a record that you'd add to your repo, pointing in the opposite direction, indicating that you don't want to be followed by that account (it would be a permanent effect until you delete the record, not a one-time thing like classic "soft blocking" is on Twitter; the user would see the follow button disabled on your profile). The way it would work is that AppView would take that into account and would make it seem as if the user is not following you, even though they technically have a follow record pointing to you. It would effectively make that follow from them to you disappear, even though the record is there. The precedent for this is how posts are handled in AppView in the context of blocks and thread gates. If someone replies to you and you block them, that comment "disappears", even though there is still a post record in the author's repo - but AppView pretends that it doesn't exist. In the same way, it would pretend that the follow record doesn't exist. |
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Alternatively, we could reuse the |
That really isn't an absurd thought, now that I consider it. It's still somewhat public but, you know, wcyd. It's actually possible to do this permanently (disabling the follow option for the subject) or on a one-time-basis by simply including the URI of the follow you want to disable. |
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Just a follow-up if this has been implemented or is still an open request. |
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Nope, still just an idea at this point |
Sounds reasonable and useful. There is a gradient of possible/wanted "feedback from other followers", where block is one of the extreme final "do not welcome here" status, and softblock more like "don`t bother me on each post please" |
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I'm inclined to think both are useful - the idea of a public denyFollow record that prevents someone from ever following again seems like a nice feature, but it'd still make sense to be able to ask the server to remove its follow record, since then any other behavior that relies on follows would work as expected, and people wouldn't be able to look up who has softblocked them later. A server could decide not to comply, but in the grand scheme of things, they can already be non-compliant in other areas like deleting content or removing spammers. Maybe request the server to delete the follow, but in the event a server doesn't comply, there can be an AppView override...? |
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I really like this solution since it uses positive public records of approvals instead of a punitive "block-like" record. |
5 centes: facebook-like approves is a different approach to twitter's "block/softblock". And softblock imho better one. Approve puts a difficulties/discomfort on the follower, make it harder to subscribe. it is visible on facebook - friend requests are sent either by spammers or after private messaging, good connection "out-of-blue" are rare. Facebook even faking friend requests by sending spoofy suggestions. Denies hurts a little and after several denies average user just dump the feature. On twitter following is much more lightweight, does not prevent organic followers grow and softblock is not a "deny" - it`s an option to not see follower in own feed, allowing him to see what he want in his feed. No regrets, no dumping feature by users :) |
Blocking an account isn't "punitive" and it's an entirely erroneous direction to attempt to ascribe moral values to the data. |
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If this feature were implemented, wouldn't it also be beneficial to extend the ability to restrict access across the entire platform, rather than just individual users? For example, it could be useful to allow accounts to restrict access by permitting interactions only from followers associated with a specific @domain.tld, or conversely, to block all interactions from accounts associated with a specific @domain.tld. By separating permissions into separate allow/disallow elements it would enable servers to enforce their own user's settings without infringing on the settings of others. |
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So, a year later, there is no option to remove a follower? I'm new to this social media, so I'm not aware of everything, but I tried to block an account and it wasn't effective. Any alternatives? |
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Blocking an account will sort of make them effectively no longer follow you, but if you unblock them they will be following you again. Still no way around this as far as I know. |
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I think Paul said he was working on some ideas for this last week |
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And there's also this related problem here: #2028 It's impossible to unfollow somebody who blocked you. |
A bit aside, but while digesting this thread I whipped up a quick button as I imagined this. I think giving people granular control has merit. edit: comment attribution |
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"A block that disallows any interaction but doesn't hide your posts" - I believe the name for this is "the Elon". |
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Please add this. I don't want any followers. |
It's impossible through the app, and I agree that should be fixed, but you can use this great tool to do it: |
I think something like this would be useful, but it'd be important to clarify the terminology first. Is "Block User" just the combination of the other two options, or would it do additional things? |
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Even if for some reason implementing this explicitly was something "to be discussed". Is there any technical reason why blocking and unblocking doesn't force an unfollow? If it's just a matter of implementing it, is there any reason why it shouldn't be this way? |
This is has been answered here but the TL;DR is this:
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Does Mastodon have this problem, as well? |
No. There are several ways to remove unwanted followers on Mastodon (blocking, soft-blocking, or there's a tool in the user prefs). |
It's a bit easier in ActivityPub since follow intents, acceptance and recovation are all direct instance-to-instance communication and follows are followee-authoritative at the protocol level to an extent (because the publisher can just choose not to send/share specific content to an instance), though order of activities may be very shuffled there. The way ActivityPub apps (formally) deal with the latter is that Bluesky could do the latter too. Unlike in ActivityPub, on ATProto this would be enforced only by the AppView, but I think that's enough since it works well for blocks already. |
That's why Bluesky will never be the next big social network. Being so reliant on a broken protocol and refusing to change will be it's demise. |
It`s a normal technical limitation, which actually make protocol robust, with single point of responsibility for user data. May be devs will be able to mitigate the issue by ability to delegate PDS hoster of unwanted follower to do basic stuff? Like unfollow by request from other trusted PDS hosters. That way majority of users will have the feature, and rogue hosters can be just blocked |
I'd like to add my own reasoning for why. I recently joined Bluesky, and was immediately followed by someone, bot or not, who was just trying to get their only fans popular... I'm not interested in that. I get that far too much on Twitter, I hate it. I don't want anyone ever reviewing my following and seeing a bunch of only fans people following me... gives of the wrong sort of vibe for my account. I did block them, but it would appear that the block doesn't remove them from the follower count, which is arguably a minor issue / bug. I still would like this feature if it's something that can be done. |
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Wanting to chime in here on "why would you want this instead of just blocking" : I'm part of a fairly niche group of users, and we recently put together some starter packs for the community. These starter packs are now being followed en masse by, largely, highly political accounts. I don't need to block these people because they can live their lives, but now I have nearly 100 followers (almost 20% of my total) who have no interest in what I post and only followed me to get a follow back. Feels bad, man. |
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+1. Having an artificially inflated follower count due to accounts that can't be removed makes the social experience feel less authentic. It's not just about the unwanted followers themselves, but about having accurate metrics that reflect real engagement and genuine community connections. The current situation where blocked users remain as followers creates a disconnect between the displayed numbers and the actual active community around something/someone. |
I don't see a good reason not to be able to manage your followers. There seem to be accounts that automatically follow someone as a way to get themselves followed -- usually do not care about that other account content. In my mind the best feature is to allow you to control that a Follow request has to be "accepted". Blocking and Follow are different unrelated purposeful activities. |
This was a huge problem on the other place. Even if we disregard the algorithm, having hundreds or thousands of inactive followers did add to the feeling of shouting into the void. I was to be able to rid myself of low-value followers, and that includes the numbers. |
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I'd also like to curate the list of people that follow me. Blocks serve a different purpose. Removing someone's follow could be an extra record that overrides the behavior of the follow record they published. It is okay for it to be public IMO. If it is not possible to prevent someone from following me due to the decentralized nature of the service, I think hiding your own followers in the list (and the counter on the profile screen) without preventing them from subscribing to your posts would be helpful, too. |
You can't see posts of accounts you have blocked. |
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In my understanding, most people here want the ability to remove followers because of spam follows by bots/people hoping for a follow-back. Having granular control over your followers is of course a great way to fix this, but maybe this should be accompanied by a button to report abusive follows? The consequences can start with a warning, continue with a temporary disablement of the follow option, etc, and should of course include the removal of suspected abusive follows (follows in quick succession before and after reported follows). This might be able to prevent most of the spam follows at the source? |
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@TomasHubelbauer hit the nail on the head, IMO: it has not been clearly covered that there are two different reasons for wanting to remove a follower that do not need to be handled the same way:
The focus here has been on looking for a single solution that covers both cases. But a single solution does not need to cover both cases: Case 1 can be handled by voluntary removal. As mentioned, yes, misbehaving servers could fail to honour this. But that is not an issue. This is roughly equivalent to, on other platforms, someone who keeps re-following after a soft block. On those other platforms, there is a simple solution for this: that is reason enough to upgrade the soft block to a hard block. Case 2 can be handled by having a way to hide followers rather than remove them. There are accounts that follow me where I do not care whether they see what I post, but if someone looks at my account to see who is following me, I would rather not have those followers visible for whatever reason. When someone looks at my profile, I should have control over what people see. If some of the data has to come from external servers that BlueSky have no control over, I should still have a say in whether that data is included. |
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Honestly, this needs to be fixed sooner rather than later. It's a vulnerability at this point. Transphobes are exploiting this (among other vulnerabilities in the platform) to send thinly veiled threats and transphobic messages to trans people. They've been making a ton of sockpuppet accounts with these kinds of messages in their bios, mass following trans people and allies, and as they get blocked, they simply make more, rinse and repeat. The inflation of follower counts might ultimately be a byproduct of this tactic, but when a trans person has more followers that want to kill them than ones that genuinely want to interact with them, it has its own negative effect on our mental health. |
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Definitely want this and, this request may be related:
Edit: in another thread, someone mentioned that bad actors could use self-mute as another harassment tactic, so it may not be the best solution specifically. But we need something that fulfills the goal, bolded. |
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Adding my voice to the chorus. Requesting the ability to remove a follower. I joined up to grab my username and immediately had a spam storefront account follow me. I can block it sure, but now my page has "1 follower", even though I have blocked that account. I've also reported the account. edit - is there at least a way to approve users who want to follow me? "You have n new follow requests." and then approve/deny each one (and a tick for approve/deny all?). |
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There are safety issues not addressed in the general discussion, I think. If someone exhibits creepy behavior and you don't want them to be aware that you've noticed them, for example. They may regard blocking as paying attention to them, create another account, and return. Blocking = encouragement. |
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Blocking can cause more alarm and damage than doing nothing. Please add the ability to remove followers. Especially with Bsky making blocks so public too. That or give the ability to block without them knowing somehow. But that will never happen. So yeah, bring the ability to remove a follow. |
and others
Feature request: Ability to remove a follower from your followers, either via soft block (block and unblock) or via a simple remove process.
At present if you block someone, and then unblock them later they are still following you .. this can be unexpected and is a behaviour pattern that is dissimilar to all other social networks. Additionally, there is no other way to remove a follower from your "herd".
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