On Mastodon, if you follow an account by clicking the “Follow” button it changes into a “Following” or “Unfollow” or “Mutual” button, depending on what interface or app you’re using and whether they are following you as well. It’s sometimes labelled “Unfollow” because clicking the follow button again lets you unfollow the account if you want to.
All of the above labels mean that the follow has succeeded straight away and is now active.
Sometimes follows don’t happen straight away
However, sometimes the follow button turns into something totally different: “Pending” or “Cancel Follow” or “Follow Request Sent”, and all of these mean the follow has not actually happened yet, although it may still happen in the future.
If the follow hasn’t happened yet, this usually means you’ve tried to follow an account that needs manual approval of followers, and you have to wait for the owner to approve your request. You can tell if an account requires approval as it will have a padlock icon 🔒 on its profile next to the username.
If the account does not have a padlock on its profile or follow requests switched on, then an error may have happened. See “They don’t have follow requests switched on” below for what to do in this case.
Does a button labelled “Unfollow” mean the same thing as a button labelled “Cancel Follow”?
No. An “Unfollow” label on the follow button means the follow succeeded. A “Cancel Follow” label on the follow button means a follow request has been sent and it’s waiting for a response.
How do I get people to accept my follow requests?
An account will be more likely to accept your follow request if you fulfil their requirements. Quite often such accounts list criteria for accepting follows in their profile text (for example many require followers to have posted before, or to have a profile text themselves).
They don’t have follow requests switched on, there is no padlock on their profile, they aren’t seeing any follow request at their end. What is going on?
Sometimes the follow request label appears even when the account you’re trying to follow doesn’t use follow requests. In this case, the message may be caused by several other things:
- A temporary glitch stopped it going through. If it’s been a while since you did the follow, cancel it and try following again.
- A more fundamental software bug has prevented the follow going through properly. This kind of bug is especially common if you’re trying to follow an account on a new or experimental type of Fediverse server.
- The server of the person you’re trying to follow has “silenced” or “limited” your server. This is a special moderation setting that means all follows from your server to that other server turn into follow requests automatically, even if the person on the other server doesn’t have follow requests on. The person on the other server will get a follow request which they can accept or deny.
- A server is overwhelmed with stuff it has to do, and is struggling to keep up so it puts tasks into a queue to deal with later.
What do I do if my follow has turned into a follow request?
Don’t panic, you can quite often resolve this yourself:
- If you see that an attempted follow has turned into a follow request but the other account doesn’t have requests switched on, try leaving it for a while as it may just be a temporary glitch.
- If that doesn’t help, try cancelling the follow completely, wait for a while and then try clicking follow again, which sometimes helps the follow to go through properly. It may take some time for the refollow to work, so wait a while afterwards too.
- If it still doesn’t work, contact your own server admin, they may be able to tell you why it is happening. If they can’t help, try contacting the admin of the server for the account you’re trying to follow. Admins can sometimes see what is happening at a deeper level or fix things that are beyond the control of an ordinary account holder.
Does this message mean someone has blocked me?
No, you don’t see this label if you’ve been blocked by someone.
The button label means the account you’re trying to follow probably just have follow requests switched on, and if they don’t then there’s probably a technical problem or some kind of server-wide limitation going on.