Some people treat a follow request like a marriage proposal.

OCTADE

Some people treat a follow request like a marriage proposal. They want to know my motives, as if I am interviewing for a job handling money or classified data. If it is that harrowing and hazardous why don't they just ignore the request or press the block or mute button?

Sam

I imagine those are the people who have internalized the Social Network model -- your followers represent your friends (to one parasocial degree or another, at least) and so who you surround yourself with says a lot about you. That's never made sense to me, I definitely interact with these sorts of software under the Feed model -- a follow is just slightly more polite RSS pull, since you introduce yourself before running off with the content (the most they might do is take a look at your feed in turn in case they find it interesting as well).

Though I guess a legitimate case for safety is if someone does a lot of posting on followers-only, in which case by accepting a follow they're including you into a more private circle. The problem there is that ActivityPub really doesn't work well on that model. From what I remember of the specs, it could very smoothly handle group visibility, but since the protocol requires software to push notifications rather than just having it up for others to pull (i.e. RSS), having followers be the only group someone can address separately breaks a number of assumptions the designers made.

notsoloud

@octade
I guess they have experiences that made them more guarded?

If it's too much for you to state your motives, just ignore and move on?

OCTADE

It's not too much for me to state my motives. I decided to meet them half way.