Following Other Users

Following another user will make all of their toots as well as other users' toots which they boost appear in your Home column. This gives you a separate timeline from the public timelines in which you can read what particular people are up to without the noise of general conversation.

 In order to follow a user, click their name or avatar to open their profile, then click the Follow icon in the top left of their profile view.

If their account has a padlock icon  next to their user name, they will receive a notification of your request to follow them and they will need to approve this before you are added to their follower list (and thus see their toots). To show you that you are waiting for someone to approve your follow request, the Follow icon  on their profile will be replaced with an hourglass icon . The requirement for new followers to be approved is something you can enable for your own profile under preferences.

Once you follow a user, the Follow icon will be highlighted in blue on their profile ; you can unfollow them again by clicking this.

If you know someone's user name you can also open their profile for following by entering it in the Search box in the Compose column. This also works for remote users, though depending on whether they are known to your home instance you might have to enter their full name including the domain (e.g. username@my.streamz.ca) into the search box before their profile will appear in the suggestions.

Alternately, if you already have a user's profile open in a separate browser tab, other Mastodon instances and most OStatus-related instances should have a "Follow" or "Subscribe" button on their profile page. This will ask you to enter the full user name to follow from (ie. if your account is on mastodon.social you would want to enter this as myaccount@my.streamz.ca)