@feditips It IS confusing, and no reasons make it less confusing.

@feditips

That's always confused me a lot.

I couldn't tell if I'm blocked or if it's a glitch or what.

@feditips

I'm not completely happy with this tip. You should recommend to **always** use "Open original page", to see the original profile.

You don't know what you're going to find there. Maybe the person you plan to follow made one decent post that you liked, but they also espouse shitty views. This does happen. Yes, I know this from experience.

Or they could be boosting "all the things." I'm fine with boosts, but I don't like it when an account is essentially just someone boosting everything they come across.

I now have to accept follow requests, and this has become more important. I'm a member of multiple minorities (look at my profile) and I don't really want bigots as followers.

@feditips

Blocking & muting accounts with few posts and few followers is a harassment-prevention strategy that is a holdover from Twitter.

It works to thwart coat-tailing, sock puppets, swarming, advertisers, and targeted harassment campaigns.

@feditips oh, I didn’t know about this. Thanks!

“Fediverse servers work like this: servers only notice accounts from other servers if someone follows or interacts with them. If no one on your server follows a particular account, and that account is on another server, then that account may appear blank to you.”

@feditips Is there a reason not to show all the account’s original posts when you view it on a server that doesn’t store any of them? The server could proxy the posts from their source server, or even just instruct the client browser to go grab and display them.

This feels important to me, as discovery is one of the big challenges for new mastodon users, and this effect is a pretty big speed bump on that road

@feditips "It is confusing, but there are really good reasons why it happens"
⬆️
Mastodon's epitaff

@feditips this is extremely useful and helps explain why I end up seeing decapitated threads

@feditips I did notice this phenomenon becoming very common when I switched from mastodon.social to the folklore.cafe, which is a_much_ smaller instance with less than 30 users.