Every once in awhile there is something big happening in the world and you want to avoid reading about it or stay clear of spoilers. Right now, we have the Summer Olympics starting in Paris so that could fall into either camp depending on your love of sports.

Fortunately, Mastodon makes it pretty easy to filter out posts containing key words. You can even set a time limit so that later on you don't have to remember to go back and turn off the filter. I did this once for the words "Biden" and "Trump" and my feed was blissfully silent on those topics. It isn't like your head is in the sand. I mean if something really big happens, you're going to hear about it through some other channel and you can simply disable the filter and posts with those key words will start flowing again.

Here's how to make it work:

• Open Mastodon and click Edit Profile
• On the left hand side, click "Filters" and the click the Add Filter button
• Title your filter anything you want
• Choose an exportation. From 30 minutes on up through never

• Next, choose where you want the filter to apply. I usually choose "Home and Lists" and "Public Timelines". I leave the others because if I'm having a conversation, I don't want to miss something. And I don't look at profiles all the time so no need to filter those.

• Next choose if you want to hide completely or behind a warning. This depends on your level of paranoia. If you choose to simply hide then you will get a message like this with the title of your filter show you which one did the hiding.

• Next enter you keyword or phrase. If you want to add more than one, click "+Add Keyword" below the box. Note that this is an OR. That is, if you put in another keyword such as "Paris" in this case, you will be filtering our any posts with "Paris" in them, not just posts with "Olympics". That probably isn't what you want.
• Click "Save Changes" and you're done!

Hope that helps you have a more peaceful feed of posts and avoid spoilers.

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