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[Feature Request] Auto-approve follow requests from followed users #14669

Open inga-lovinde opened 4 years ago

inga-lovinde commented 4 years ago

Pitch

If user A has a locked account and already follows user B, user B should be able to follow back without "waiting for approval" and without user A having to monitor their follow requests list.

If user A does not want user B to follow them, user A is free not to follow user B (or to unfollow and block them).

Motivation

I think that this feature will benefit most users who have their account locked (+their mutuals), although I might be wrong.

As I understand, the "locked account" feature is used to restrict who can read one's tweets to one's close (relatively) friends. However, if they follow someone, this person they follow is probably already their friend, and there is no point in additional checks. I've had situations when someone followed me (presumably checking my bio/public toots already), I follow them back, and then it takes a week or two for them to approve my request anyway... so what's the point in adding that additional friction? They want us to become mutuals and they already performed an interaction that made it clear that they're not against that, so what's the point in requiring some additional confirmation from them?

On the other hand, I don't think that I want people with locked accounts who don't want me to follow them, to follow me. There is even a (relatively) widespread problem on twitter when chasers with locked accounts follow someone with open accounts and one cannot even see what they tweet for their followers so one has to ban them or to lock their account too (if there is a rise in chasers activity) losing genuine people. I know a lot of people who don't like the approval feature on Twitter not being reciprocal, and I don't see any drawbacks if it was reciprocal.

inga-lovinde commented 4 years ago

Also #14483 might be related

dualhammers commented 3 years ago

I was about to make a post with a feature request related to this idea.

I would like to be able to keep my account locked (and approving follows from close friends) but also allow people to be able to follow me from other servers. Meaning I want my public posts to actually be public and thus useful for discovery of me and my instance but not require a follow to keep seeing my posts (if we are cross instance).

Reason being I consider mutual follows to be a signal of close friendship, but I don't think following means I want to be their friend - in fact quite the opposite: if one were to assume a follow from me is an overture to friendship it creates a precdent that allows parasocial relationships and miscommunication to flourish

So it feels like we need some sort of extra layer. Perhaps people can follow but they don't get access to personal posts until we are mutuals?

inga-lovinde commented 3 years ago

if one were to assume a follow from me is an overture to friendship it creates a precdent that allows parasocial relationships

Not sure what exactly do you mean, and how the latter follows from the former? Maybe you could give some (fictional) examples?