When you first sign up for Mastodon, anyone on Mastodon can follow you, send you a direct message, and see the list of people you follow and your followers. If you decide not to share your thoughts and profile information with others on Mastodon, the following post will help explain all the ways you can change your Mastodon profile to private.
How to Use Mastodon Social Network | Beginner's Guide
Despite all the similarities to Twitter, Mastodon does not offer users a kill switch to change their public profile on the platform to private. While you may be used to using a locked or protected account on Twitter, you won’t find any such option to make your account more private on Mastodon. What you do get is a set of more granular controls that you can choose to limit certain features of Mastodon in terms of visibility.
Related: How to Quote Someone's Post on Mastodon
While Mastodon doesn’t have a dedicated toggle that lets you switch to a private account, there are other ways to make various aspects of the platform private and your account less discoverable. Instead of a single toggle, Mastodon offers a number of options you can configure to change the privacy of your account on the platform.
