The ability to unfollow all

Question

Looking at the occasional new post to an old question that I've followed, I realise that most of the posts I'm getting pings from I'm no longer interested in.

Having been over-enthusiastic at pressing buttons when I first joined, I followed many more posts than I really need to keep track of - more than 1,000 across the network I'd guess. Some I'd like to keep - about 100 here on meta, and a handful on other sites. Worldbuilding has 200 possible reasons to ping me, and I only really want about half a dozen. I'm fairly certain that I can't be alone in this.

Now, I can use the individual unfollow button from the activity page of the profile, this is fine for individual posts.

I'm not a coder, so I can't write a neat few lines to wipe the slate clean with any certainty it wouldn't delete my whole account or give me unicorn hoofprints over everything.

Request:

Could we have either (on a per-site basis):

• An "unfollow all" button - with the traditional confirmation to prevent accidents.

• An even better system of being able to select ones we want to keep, then invert the selection and delete those?

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Related post regarding unfollowing all answers of a single question.

Answer 1

An "unfollow all" button - with the traditional confirmation to prevent accidents.

I created a userscript that allows for exactly that, as well as introduces several optional "auto-follow" features. It adds an "unfollow all" button when one is viewing their profile's "following" tab to the top right of the followed posts lists. On click, it loads a modal where one can initiate (or even undo) the process.

A full feature breakdown can be found on the Stack Apps post linked above, but here is a small demo of the functionality relevant to this request:

Note that the process is intentionally a bit slow as everything on the network is rate-limited, and one risks getting a temporary IP ban if making unthrottled requests. The current setting is set to respect the 2-second throttle on page load and has a 0.5-second delay between each post unfollow.

Given that there are 30 posts per page, it will take approximately a minimum of 17 seconds to process a full page. If you have a lot of posts to process, just make some and kick back, the script will do the rest.

There is also an "Undo" button that will refollow all posts that the script managed to process so far in case one changes their mind mid-flight. One can also always "Abort" the current action immediately in case of emergency.

Finally, the script supports unfollowing posts by type ("Start Qs" and "Start As" for questions and answers respectively), or all at once.

An even better system of being able to select ones we want to keep, then invert the selection and delete those?

Unfortunately, this is a bit too involved (as it will require rolling out an interactive UI for searching and selecting posts to keep / unfollow), so I decided to omit it for the initial release, but it is likely to be coming in version 2.0.0 soon.