> It's just that when you try to follow new people then they get a prompt to decide if they want to let you do that first, effectively making their profiles def

> It's just that when you try to follow new people then they get a prompt to decide if they want to let you do that first, effectively making their profiles default-private. Not exactly. Requiring follow requests be approved, and defaulting new posts to other than fully public status, both exist as orthogonal profile settings in Mastodon and all forks of which I'm aware. I don't have any specific familiarity on the Inditoot situation, but it sounds like the action taken by mastodon.social admins amounted to effectively overriding the "follow requests have to be approved" setting to true specifically for requests from Inditoot members. That seems fairly reasonable to me, too.