I want to read the public timeline, but would love to be able to exclude spammy users from my view (eg. here on loadaverage we have @mauthausengusen and I don't speak Spanish and I don't care about its news that it posts every 7 minutes).

Blocking apparently doesn't change a thing, it only disallows them to follow me, but doesn't expunge their posts from my timelines. There is however no mute functionality from what I could see...

Do you !gnusocial people have any ideas I could try?