jsha/blocktogether

Block Together is a tool designed to help Twitter users deal with harassment and abuse. It lets you share your list of blocked accounts with other people, and subscribe to block lists that others have shared. The core idea is that if someone is harassing people in a particular community, one person can block the harasser and then share that block with everyone else, so the whole group can quickly protect themselves without each person having to identify and block the abuser individually. At a high level, the app connects to your Twitter account through Twitter's official API. Once connected, it can apply blocks, unblocks, and mutes on your behalf. When you subscribe to someone else's block list, the app takes the accounts they've blocked and applies those same blocks to your account. This is why it needs read and write access to your Twitter account, without write permission, it couldn't actually block anyone for you. The people who would benefit most from this are communities that face coordinated harassment on Twitter, for example, journalists, activists, game developers, or marginalized groups who are frequently targeted. If a group of people is being harassed by the same set of accounts, one trusted member can curate a block list and share it, and the rest can subscribe rather than each person having to track down and block every harasser themselves. It's essentially a crowdsourced defense mechanism against abuse. Setting it up requires creating your own Twitter app with read and write permissions, which involves registering a developer application through Twitter and plugging in API keys. The project uses a database (MySQL or MariaDB) to store block data, and the setup instructions recommend using Vagrant, which is a tool that creates a consistent development environment so you don't have to worry about configuring everything manually on your own machine.