How many of you enable request to follow?

Fediverse@lemmy.ml – 1 points – 1 years ago

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.

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.

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.