Granted, Twitter is a heaping mess, but all the chaos that its new billionaire Chief Twit has wrought has also made it more addictive. While many users might have already flocked to Mastodon, those who decided to remain might still be able to get the best the site has to offer. If you, like most others, are currently experiencing very cluttered timelines, then you’ll find this new toola big help; ladies and gentlemen, introducing: ‘Prune’!
Isn’t That A Gardening Term?
No, we don’t mean prune as in to trim or shape the edge of greenery, but Prune the app that shows you the people that you follow – in four categories: Overpopular (most followed), Underpopular (least followed), Overactive (accounts that Tweet a lot), Inactive (near-dead accounts). With Prune, you can easily unfollow accounts that you think are no longer worth following. The app also shows you all the accounts that you’ve unfollowed via an in-app side menu.
The tools within Prune were made by Norway-based developerQueen Raae, who told TechCrunch, via DM on Twitter, that she made Prune because she was reaching the following limit on the platform. As Raae explains:
“I hit the 5000 followers limit (after almost 16 years on Twitter) and had a hard time finding an account to unfollow. Twitter has only one view of the accounts you follow, with the most recently followed on top. So I got the idea to build something for myself.”
We have to say, the tool is pretty neat and useful, not that you absolutely need a separate, third-party tool to unfollow people, but having a dedicated platform to make the process more manageable and ‘clean’ is a welcomed bonus. Prune can currently facilitate up to 50 unfollows every 15 minutes or 500 total unfollows a day. Once you hit the limit, you can manually click and unfollow individual profiles on Twitter itself.
Raae mentions that to overcome this limit, she’s trying out several experimental features. One possibility is to display a total counter on the website to stagger access to the tool. Raae’s also contemplating a feature that lets people add Twitter accounts to a list. Later, users can then open this list on Twitter and unfollow accounts in one go. She added that early users have demanded that they want to see more filters like the number of interactions with that account and a list of accounts that don’t follow them back. What’s more, Raae said another idea for the future is to introduce a custom filter so users can search for something like ‘Show me all web3 accounts with less than 3000 followers.’
The Wrap
Honestly, some of these could be easily solved by Twitter simply tweaking its API, but the Musk-led company has already shut down multiple developer-related initiatives, including Twitter Toolbox. Without going into the details, because that’ll just further highlight just how messy things have been and still are over at Twitter, we can say that third-party initiatives such as this are perhaps the few saving graces Twitter can still reliably anchor itself on. It’ll likely get worse from here until Musk irons out what he believes he should, so it’s best to use the app while you can, or at least use any non-official app that adds more quality-of-life features.
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