On the Fediverse, and especially on Mastodon, if you follow an account by clicking the “Follow” button it changes into a “Following” or “Unfollow” button, depending on what you’re using to view Mastodon. Clicking this changed button lets you unfollow the account if you want to.
However, sometimes the follow button turns into “Pending” or “Cancel Follow” or “Follow Request Sent”, and this means the follow hasn’t actually happened yet.
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, then an error may have happened. See below for what to do in this case.)
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 accounts that have follow requests switched on will have criteria for accepting follows mentioned in their profile text (for example many require followers to have posted before, or to have a profile text).
They don’t have follow requests switched on, there is no padlock on their profile. So why is it giving me a message like they do?
Sometimes the follow request message appears even when the account you’re trying to follow doesn’t have manual approval mode switched on. 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 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” 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?
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.
If it still doesn’t work, contact your own server admin, and if they can’t help try contacting the admin of the server for the account you’re trying to follow.
Does this message mean someone has blocked me?
No, you don’t see this message if you’ve been blocked by someone.
The message means the account you’re trying to follow probably just have follow requests switched on, and if they don’t then there’s just a technical problem.