How to use LJ's surprisingly good content filters
It took me a while of being back on LJ to find out that it now has 1) a tag filtering system at all, which is 2) way more useful than anything on tumblr, even before tumblr went over to the algorithmic timeline and ruined everything. So I figured I should make a guide for both newbies and oldbies who are in the same position I was in!
Under the cut, with a bunch of screenshots.
How to filter the entries that appear on your friends feed
The difference in LJ's system is that it filters by a specific user's tags, instead of filtering a term universally across your feed. To show you how it works, I'll walk through the process using renowned fantasy writer Caitlin Kiernan's profile as an example.
First you need to navigate to the user's profile page, which you'll find linked from any entry or the main page of their journal. It'll look like this. You'll then want to click on the "Modify Friend" tab at the top left corner:
This will take you to a whole bunch of options, of which tag filtering is one. You want to open the "Modify entries feed" menu shown here.
So now I'm looking at all the tags that renowned fantasy writer Caitlin Kiernan has ever used on her livejournal. There are a lot of them! Maybe I only want to hear about her novels and not her daily walks; I could go to "Include selected tags" and select just the novel-related ones, and only those will appear in my feed. (I don't know why I would want to skip everything else she posted, but the tag filtering system isn't here to judge me.)
The more commonly useful part of this menu, for me and probably most people, is the "Exclude selected tags" part, so let's click that one.
I can now pore over the list of every tag on her LJ or, if I know I want to filter out something specific, I can type it in the search field and see if she posts anything with that tag. I'll look for the Number One threat to America: BEARS.
Once I'm done selecting tags from the list, I'll have a little collection of tags at the bottom here:
If I messed up while I was selecting tags, or I changed my mind, I can click on a tag down here to switch it back.
After setting up my feed preferences, I have to remember to click "SAVE CHANGES" before leaving the page - the settings will not autosave.
Or in this case, obviously, I clicked "cancel" because I don't want to actually make these changes on my feed.
Now that I've set these preferences, my friends feed will not include posts that Caitlin Kiernan has tagged with "atlanta", "bears", "star trek", or "urine". But I will still be able to see those posts normally if I go directly to her journal, and I'll still see posts with those tags from the rest of my LJ friends unless I've set the same preferences for all of them.
The process is the same on the mobile site, but the profile page will look like this and you'll want to click the little gear thing to get to the modify page:
Let me know if this is helpful and if anything's confusing! I'm trying to make sure it's understandable to people who are learning how to use LJ and not just to those of us who speak it natively, as it were.