If a profile looks blank, don’t assume it is blank.
Fediverse servers work like this: servers only really notice accounts from other servers if someone on your server follows or interacts with them.
The reason servers work like this because of resources. If servers had to keep a copy of every post from millions of users on thousands of Fediverse servers in the world, server running costs would become prohibitively expensive (and most of those posts would probably never be read by anyone on your server anyway).
The idea of the Fediverse is to let anyone start their own server if they want to, and this process of servers “noticing” accounts helps keep servers cheap enough for anyone to run their own ⧉.
What happens if I follow an apparently blank account?
Once you follow an account, your own server will start paying attention to whatever that account posts. This means if it creates any new posts or shares any posts after your follow, they will be visible on your server as well.
If you want to stop someone’s account looking blank, give it a follow. There is no harm in following people, there is no algorithm to worry about so a follow won’t start doing weird things to your feed. All that a follow does on the Fediverse is show you that account’s posts and shares, it doesn’t have any other effects.
How do I check what a blank account really looks like?
To see the most complete version of an account, go to its profile, click on ⋯ and then “Open original page” or “Open in browser”. This should open the profile on its home server’s website, which will show the most up to date version of the profile.
Note that you can’t easily interact with a profile on its home server’s website, because the other server doesn’t know who you are. You will find it easier to interact with a profile within your own server’s website or within your app. If there’s a particular post that you really want to interact with and it isn’t visible on your server, you can force your server to notice it by copy-pasting the post’s web address into the search box on your server.
How to prevent your own profile from ever looking blank
There is a really simple way to prevent your server ever looking blank to anyone: pin some of your posts on your profile. You can pin up to five posts on a profile, and these can include attached photos, video and audio. You can also make them into threads of unlimited length, and the entire thread will be automatically federated to everyone who browses your profile.
Pinned posts behave differently at a technical level. Mastodon servers automatically fetch pinned posts for all accounts viewed or mentioned by someone on a server, even if no one is following that account. This doesn’t currently happen with unpinned posts, which is why pinning is so important in preventing blank profiles.
This is really silly and complicated, isn’t there some simpler way to fix this situation?
There may be a possible solution to blank profiles on the way called “backfilling”. This would mean as soon as you follow someone your server would automatically check the account for past posts and display some or all of them on your server. With backfilling there would be much less need to fiddle around with original pages etc, and backfilling already happens for pinned posts as noted above.
At time of writing backfilling is the most popular suggestion on the Mastodon github site, and if you’re comfortable using github you can go and give it a thumbs up ⧉.
The reason it hasn’t happened before is concern over server resources, the developers of Mastodon don’t want to overload smaller servers. However, there is a promising draft proposal currently being worked on which would keep load to a minimum ⧉.
Accounts with restricted post visibility
An alternative reason why an active account might look blank is this: if the account has follower requests on (indicated by a padlock 🔒 next to their name), and if all its posts are followers-only, then you will not see any posts on their profile until you follow them and your follow request is accepted.
These kinds of account will look blank to anyone on any server, even their own, because the account holder has chosen to deliberately hide their posts except to their own followers.
Some accounts really are blank, of course
If an account profile looks blank, and you check the original page and it’s blank there as well, and it doesn’t have follower requests activated, then perhaps it really is blank.