A third-party tool called ‘Prune Your Follows’ allows you to trim your follow list on Twitter using filters. The tool seems useful for those who have many inactive users in their following list on the platform.
Twitter has been through a lot of alterations ever since Elon Musk acquired it in October 2022. Several users have even migrated to other platforms, like Mastodon. Yet, Twitter’s user base remains significant, and many Twitter users need a feature that lets them manage their followers list on the go.
While these users want to make the most out of Twitter, they can only do a little about cleaning their cluttered timelines other than individually unfollowing the spamming or inactive users.
Nonetheless, Queen Raae, a Norwegian developer, has taken this issue into cognizance and developed a tool called “Prune Your Follows.”
The feature reportedly integrates with your Twitter user account and shows the user accounts you follow on Twitter in four categories, viz. Overactive, Unactive [sic], Overpopular, and Underpopular.
The accounts shown under the Overpopular category are the most followed ones, whereas the accounts in the Underpopular category are the least followed ones.
Likewise, the accounts under the Overactive category are those that tweet a lot, and those in the Unactive category rarely tweet anything. With “Prune Your Follows,” you can quickly unfollow the people on Twitter who you think aren’t worth it anymore.
The tool also has a feature that lets you see the accounts you’ve unfollowed on Twitter.
The tool Raae developed is clean, but Twitter binds the API limitations of the tool. With “Prune Your Follows,” you can remove 50 followers every 15 minutes with a daily limit of 500 unfollows per day.
You can still unfollow the accounts manually after the tool has reached its daily limit, and Raae is trying to enhance this limit. She plans to develop a feature allowing users to add accounts to a list. The user can later unfollow all the accounts added to the list in one go.
Why “Prune Your Follows”?
Queen Raae says that she made this tool because she was reaching the maximum follow limit allowed by Twitter.
She said that she’s been active on Twitter for the past 16 years and found it challenging and time-consuming to unfollow the accounts that aren’t worth following anymore, as Twitter only shows the accounts most recently followed on the top.
She also added that the users are demanding more filters that would allow them to see several interactions with a Twitter user and a list of people that don’t follow them back on Twitter.
Raae says that some of these problems would have been easily solved if Twitter didn’t tweak its API. However, Musk-owned Twitter has closed several developer-friendly initiatives, including the Twitter Toolbox.