A web app intended to help cope with harassment and abuse on Twitter.
Block Together is designed to reduce the burden of blocking when many accounts are attacking you, or when a few accounts are attacking many people in your community. It uses the Twitter API. If you choose to share your list of blocks, your friends can subscribe to your list so that when you block an account, they block that account automatically. You can also use Block Together without sharing your blocks with anyone.
Sometimes, attackers who get blocked will create new accounts (called "sockpuppets") to get around the block. To deal with sockpuppet accounts, Block Together has options to let you auto-block accounts meeting certain criteria: created less than seven days ago and/or having fewer than 15 followers. Block Together uses Twitter's Streaming API to find such accounts when they mention you, so it can usually block them in under a second.
Block Together will never block an account you follow, even if it meets one of the above criteria. Similarly, if Block Together incorrectly blocks an account (for instance, a friend's new account), you can unblock that account on Twitter. Block Together will notice the fact and avoid blocking that account again in the future. Also, every time Block Together blocks someone, the event is recorded on the 'Actions' tab, so you can check who's been blocked and fix any issues.
If you subscribe to a block list, you will block every account currently on that list. Later, if the author of that block list blocks more accounts, you will automatically block those as well. If the author of the list unblocks an account, you will automatically unblock it too, but only if you originally blocked it through the shared list. If you blocked the account independently, it will not be unblocked.
If you choose to share your block list with friends, Block Together will create an unlisted, unguessable URL to access your block list. You can share the URL by email or Direct Message if you want to keep it private among friends, or you can tweet the URL if you are okay sharing your block list publicly. You can always disable sharing from the Settings page. If you do so, the URL to access your blocks will be deleted forever. If you choose to share again in the future, you will create a new, different URL. If you choose to disable sharing, you have to separately remove any subscribers you no longer want, on the Subscriptions page.
Many people find that they don't want to share their block list because they find there are accounts on it they don't remember blocking, or that aren't particularly abusive. This is partly because Twitter, for a long time, did not offer Mute. So if you wanted to stop seeing a merely unfunny account that gets frequently retweeted, blocking used to be the only fix. Now Twitter offers Mute, so you can Mute those accounts instead. Block Together makes it easy to remove them from your shared block list with the 'Unblock and Mute' button on the My Blocks page.
Block Together only blocks accounts, it never reports them for spam or abuse. Adding an account to your shared block list will not cause that account to be suspended. People whose accounts get suspended can contact Twitter Support for more information.
This is beta software. My hope is to build a community to help develop Block Together. Everyone is welcome. Skills especially needed: Graphic design, UX design, HTML, CSS, and Javascript coding (the backend is in Node), and Ops.
Code is here. To get involved: