You stay connected to everyone. Unfollowing is not disconnecting — your connections stay connections, you just stop seeing their posts. And because emptying the Following list does not empty the feed, Quiet feed hides what LinkedIn refills it with.
Install it
Three steps, about two minutes. It is not on the Chrome Web Store — here is why.
1 Download the zip and unzip it
Take linkedin-unfollow.zip from the
latest release
and unzip it somewhere you will keep it. Chrome loads the extension from that folder every
time it starts, so do not leave it in Downloads and then empty Downloads.
2 Open chrome://extensions and turn on Developer mode
Type that address in by hand — it will not come up in search results. The switch is in the top-right corner.
3 Click "Load unpacked", pick the folder, pin the icon
Pick the folder itself — the one holding manifest.json, not a file inside it.
Then click the jigsaw-piece icon in the toolbar and pin LinkedIn Unfollow. Sign in to
LinkedIn as normal and click the icon.
Then: preview, try one, run it
- Check count — how many accounts you follow. Changes nothing.
- Preview — the list of people it would unfollow, read by exactly the same call. Sends no unfollow at all.
- Unfollow — set "Unfollow up to" to 1 first, run it, and check that person really is unfollowed. Then set it to 25, or 500, or clear the box for everyone.
Under the number box are two tick boxes, both off to begin with: also unfollow my connections, which is the one that actually silences the feed, and fast, which sends three at a time. While it runs there is a progress line and a Stop button, which ends the run after the person it is on. 800 people takes roughly fifteen minutes, and you can close the popup while it works.
Connections are followed too
Emptying the Following list to zero does not silence your feed. LinkedIn makes you follow everybody you connect with, and those connections never appear on the "Following" page — which is the list LinkedIn shows you, and the list this extension reads. Verified on a real account: with that list down to 0, the feed was still full of posts from connections.
The state is visible on your followers list instead, where every row comes back with its own following state. That is what the tick box under "Unfollow up to" turns on: also unfollow my connections (scans your followers list; slower). With it ticked, a run works through the Following list exactly as before, then reads your followers list fifty at a time and unfollows the ones still marked as followed.
Nobody is disconnected — you stay connected, you just stop seeing the posts. It is slower because it is far more reading: 9,479 followers is 190 requests before a single unfollow is sent, so "Check count" with the box ticked takes a couple of minutes and shows "Scanning followers… N of M" while it works.
Quiet feed: what unfollowing cannot fix
Unfollow everybody and the feed does not go quiet — it refills. Unfollowing removes what you subscribed to, and nothing else. LinkedIn then fills the space with what the people you are still connected to have been doing — the posts they liked, commented on and reposted — plus its own suggestions and its ads. Quiet feed hides all of that in the page, so what is left is the people you chose to follow.
Verified on a real account the day after unfollowing everyone: with the Following list at zero, every post on the home feed carried a header line above the author saying why it was there.
| "Priya likes this", "celebrates", "finds this insightful" | somebody's reaction |
|---|---|
| "Priya commented", "Priya and 3 others commented" | somebody's comment |
| "Priya reposted this" | somebody's repost |
| "Followed by Priya" | somebody a connection follows |
| "Priya follows this page" | somebody a connection follows |
| "Suggested" · "Promoted" | LinkedIn's own recommendation, and an ad |
| a Follow button on the post, and no header | somebody you don't follow — an unlabelled suggestion |
| a group's name above an inline author line ("Tariq Mahmood • 3rd+") | a post in a group you joined |
| "Jobs recommended for you", "People you may know", "Add to your feed" | a recommendation module, not a post at all |
| none of the above | somebody you follow — this is what stays |
Everything past the first few rows took two more passes against the live feed to find, and none of it is a header. LinkedIn only draws a Follow button on a post when you do not already follow its author, which makes it the same statement "Suggested" makes without the word — and on a feed you have just emptied it is the largest category there is. Ads on company pages put "Promoted" under the page name rather than above it, and company posts carry no connection-degree marker at all: their author block is a bare follower count. A group post puts the group's name where a header would go and runs the author's name and degree together on one line, where a plain person's post puts the name on its own line above a bare "• 3rd+". And the recommendation modules have no author at all, so they announce themselves in a fixed phrase on their first line, matched whole: "Recommended for you" is a module, "Recommended for you: three books" is somebody's post.
LinkedIn's markup has no stable class names, so all of this is read off the rendered text of the post. Everything unclear is left alone: an item with no author block — a degree marker, a follower count, or the post's own age — is not a post as far as this is concerned, which is the composer, the draft box, the "Start a post" card, "Add to your feed" and the sort control; a header form it has not been taught falls through to shown; and a Follow button only counts as one when it is a line of its own up where the author is, so "Follow us on Instagram" in somebody's post is not one. It hides only what it positively recognised.
A master switch and four tick boxes sit in the popup, above the unfollow card, all five on to begin with: network activity, promoted, suggested-or-not-followed, and posts in groups you have joined. One grey line at the top of the feed says what it did — "Quiet feed: hid 30 posts (4 network activity, 3 promoted, 5 recommendations, 12 from people you don't follow, 6 from groups). Show them" — and Show them puts every one of them back for that page load. Nothing is deleted and nothing is sent: it adds one CSS class to posts already in your browser, the moment LinkedIn inserts them.
How it works, and where it stops
It sends the same requests linkedin.com's own pages send, from your own signed-in browser: the Following list, the followers list (only when "also unfollow my connections" is ticked), and one unfollow per person. The count is LinkedIn's own total, so it is the real number rather than a count of rows on screen.
- Paced like a human. One person every 0.8–1.6 seconds, randomised, one request at a time. Never a burst.
- Stops on any LinkedIn challenge. 429, 451, 401 and 403 end the run on the spot, and so do two failures in a row. Nothing is ever retried.
- Never more than you asked for. The limit is enforced in the engine, and you can stop a run at any point.
-
Nothing leaves your browser. No account, no server, no analytics, no
telemetry, no third-party requests of any kind. The only host it talks to is
www.linkedin.com, with your own cookies. - Nothing is bypassed. It uses your own session, at a fraction of the rate a person clicking could manage. No security measure is defeated or worked around — when LinkedIn puts up a challenge, it stops.
- You can read all of it. No build step, MIT licensed. What you install is what is in the repository.
Fast mode. Ticking "Fast (3 at a time — more likely to trip LinkedIn's rate limit)" runs three streams over the same list instead of one, each leaving 0.5–0.9 seconds between its own requests: roughly four unfollows a second rather than one. They share one cursor, one list of people already handled and one pool of limit slots, so they cannot between them overshoot your limit or send anyone twice, and a refusal on any one of them ends the run for all three. Careful, one at a time, is the default, and it is the one to use.
Questions
Is this against LinkedIn's terms?
Yes — automating your account is. LinkedIn's User Agreement prohibits using bots or other automated methods to access the service, and LinkedIn restricts and permanently bans accounts for it. This tool does not pretend otherwise. Use it on your own account, with your eyes open, or do not use it.
Does it bypass any security measure?
No. It sends the requests the page itself sends, signed with your own session cookie, more slowly than a person clicking could manage. It does not defeat rate limits, solve challenges, rotate identities, or touch anyone else's account.
It said 0 following but I still see posts from connections.
That is what the "also unfollow my connections" tick box is for. Connections are followed automatically when you connect and never appear in LinkedIn's Following list, so emptying that list leaves every one of them behind. Tick the box and run it again — it reads your followers list, where their state actually shows up.
Will I lose my connections?
No. Unfollowing is not disconnecting. Your connections stay connections; you just stop seeing their posts, and you can follow anyone again by hand.
Can I undo it?
No — not in bulk. Unfollowing 800 people would have to be reversed 800 times by hand. That is exactly why Preview, and a limit of 1, exist. Use them.
Do you see any of my data?
No. There is nothing to see it with: no account, no backend, no analytics.
Why is it not in the Chrome Web Store?
Store policy forbids extensions that facilitate breaking another site's terms of service, and an honest reading of LinkedIn's terms puts automating your own account in that territory. Loading it unpacked keeps the decision — and the code you are running, which you can read — with you.
Before you install it
Automating your LinkedIn account may breach LinkedIn's User Agreement. LinkedIn detects automation and restricts, suspends and permanently bans accounts for it, including accounts that have done nothing else wrong. That risk is entirely yours. The pacing and the stop conditions here reduce it; nothing removes it.
This software is provided as is, without warranty of any kind. The author is not responsible for any restriction, suspension or loss of your LinkedIn account, for any people you unfollow and cannot get back, or for any other consequence of running it. It performs an irreversible bulk action on your own account: preview first, try one, and never run it against an account you cannot afford to lose. It is for your own account only.