Follow requests

Most people watching a video with you are Masked, which means you can see that they are there without knowing who they are. A follow request is the way across that gap: you ask, and they decide. Neither of you has to give anything away to find out.

Asking to follow someone

In the People list, every row has the person's mask and a Jump to their spot. A row you can act on also carries one of two buttons:

• Follow on someone appearing as themselves. There is nothing to ask, so this follows their persona straight away.
• Ask to follow on someone behind a mask. This sends a request instead.

The button turns to Request sent once your ask goes out. That is all it will ever say. You are not told whether it arrived, whether they read it, or what they decided.

You ask as the persona you are currently using, and that persona is the only thing about you the request carries. Your account name, your email and your other personas never travel with it.

You can send 20 requests a day. Past that, the button tells you plainly that you have hit the limit and to try tomorrow.

What the other person sees

They see the persona that asked, the mask they were wearing at the time, and the video it happened on. Nothing else, and there is no message: a request carries no free text at all, so it can never become a way to send someone something they did not ask for.

Answering a request

A request reaches you as a notification on the bell. Opening that notification opens your Follow requests list, where every request waiting on you sits together.

Accept asks you one more question before it does anything: which of your personas will they end up following? You pick from your personas, and the one your mask was already wearing is preselected when there is one. Saying yes reveals that single persona, not your account, and not the rest of your personas.

Accepting is also how the person who asked learns the answer. They simply start following the persona you chose, and see it the way they would see any other follow.

Decline ends it there. They won't be notified. To them, a declined request looks exactly like one nobody has got round to yet, and it will quietly disappear on its own. That silence is deliberate: a decline you can detect is a decline that costs you something to give.

Requests quietly expire after 30 days.

Blocking instead

Every request also offers Block persona. Blocking removes the request, and that persona can no longer ask the persona of yours they reached. If the one they reached was your default persona, the block reaches further: they cannot ask any of your personas again.

Blocking also ends the following between those two personas. If either of you was following the other, both of those follows go, and your counts settle on their own.

A block is scoped to the persona that asked, not to the account behind it. Someone using several personas can ask again from a different one, and it will arrive as a new request from a persona you have not blocked. You can block each one you see. This is the honest limit of a system where nobody's personas are publicly linked to each other. The same design that stops anyone from tying your personas together is what stops us from tying theirs.

What we keep

Vid Receipts stores each request — who asked, which mask they asked through, and what happened to it — so we can enforce rate limits and investigate abuse. The person you ask never sees your account, only the persona you asked with. If they decline, you are not told: to you, a declined request looks the same as one that was never answered, and it quietly expires after 30 days.

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