Controlling visibility

Every post carries a visibility, chosen when you write it. It decides who is shown the post and where it can appear.

The four levels

• Public — anyone can see it, including people who are not signed in. It appears on your profile, in your followers' timelines, on the public and network timelines, on hashtag pages and in search.
• Unlisted — anyone who has the link can see it, and it appears on your profile and in your followers' timelines, but it is kept off the public timelines and out of discovery. Use it when you want to post without broadcasting.
• Followers only — only the people who follow you are shown it. It is not on your public profile and not in search.
• Direct — only the accounts named in the post are shown it. This is what a direct message is.

Change the level from the privacy selector while composing. It applies to that post; it is not a setting you turn on once.

Making your whole account private

A private account is the account-level version of the same idea: new followers have to be approved by you before they can see anything, and your posts are shown to approved followers rather than to the public. Turn it on at privacy settings. You are asked at that point whether to keep the followers you already have.

Approving and refusing pending requests is at follow requests.

Things worth knowing before you rely on it

• Changing a post's visibility later does not un-send it. Anyone who already saw it, saw it.
• A public post that has federated has been copied to other servers. Deleting it here asks them to delete their copy, and most do — but the copy is on their disk, not ours.
• Followers-only posts are delivered to the servers your followers are on. Those servers are trusted to show them to the right people, which is the same trust you place in this one.
• A screenshot defeats every level of this, everywhere, always.

If the problem is a specific person rather than the audience in general, blocking or muting them is the more direct tool. nicagram applies both.