I recently made a mastodon account after deleting mine about six months ago. Joining Lemmy has made me curious about what I left behind.
Do you enable require follow requests?
I used to be pretty permissive, but the people I admired had that turned on. I turned it on for my new account the moment I thought to ask this question.
Are there upside or downsides to this? Please share any thoughts I want to know if it even matters.
It’s hard enough already to get followers and SEE content from people you follow. Making a request to follow someone makes it even worse in my opinion.
On Mastodon, yes. I think I could turn it off now. There was a time just a few months ago when there was a wave of spam accounts following people. Some were legit but they landed on Fedi during one of the Twitter migrations and just started following everyone but posting no content so I began using request to follow.
You know what, I thought about what I posted, and I am going to stay on my instance. I joined it because I think the name is cool and I like the logo.
Also, the admin welcomed me, and I would feel like a massive dysfunctional dick if I left. So, I will stick with it, focus on the federated timeline, and maybe join the patreon if there is on.
I think I will leave it on. I am not too happy with the instance I chose, so I may look to migrate. I think the instance itself strives to be cozy and active, but there is one guy who goes off about U.S. politics constantly like he is on a manic episode, and I had to mute him. Yet, the local timeline is just not that active or interesting.
I don’t share (or like) anything that I don’t want made public, so I don’t mind who follows my profiles on social media. But some people would rather keep a lower profile or be more selective of who can interact with them, so it’s better to have the option available.
I run a GoToSocial instance and have it on, not so much because I don’t want to allow people to follow me (so far I think I’ve approved all requests) but because having it off means that a bot can easily get to my followers-only posts and archive or distribute them, and some iffy instances have been doing that in order to build search engines and the like.