When you follow someone you’ll see all their posts in your home timeline in chronological order. No posts will be hidden, but when you follow a lot of people it can be easy to miss some of the posts because there may be just so many of them.
On Mastodon, if there are particular accounts where you want to make sure you see their posts, you can set these accounts to also notify you when they post. They will still be in your timeline as normal, but you’ll also get an an alert in your Notifications section.
Here’s how to do it:
- Log in through your server’s website or through the web app or certain third party apps
- Go to the profile of the person you want to be notified about
- Click the bell icon 🔔 next to their follow/unfollow button.
Note that this only works for people you follow. Also, if you want to stop notifications just click the same bell icon again.
Can I do this through apps too?
Yes and no. The official apps don’t have notification bells yet, but some third party ones do such as Ice Cubes on iPhone/iPad, or Tusky and Fedilab on Android. The ones that support the notification bell usually show an actual bell icon, but some may have a slightly different icon.