Follow

I got into a rather odd conversation with a casual friend on social media the other day. Apparently, he was ‘disappointed’, as he put it, that I had yet to accept his friend request on ‘site C’. He follows me already on Site A, B & D, but somehow my not accepting him on site C was somehow an imaginary slight. In the end, he seems to have “unfollowed” me on said sites. I’m devastated. /sarcasm

I’ll be honest here, I don’t get this sort of behavior. Even if you are a good friend I know in person, I may not follow you on every site that we might mutually be on. I use different social outlets in different ways. Sometimes our interests may overlap enough that I follow someone on multiple sites. Sometimes they don’t and I won’t. That is pretty much the end of my reasoning. The implication I got was that he felt since we were ‘friends’ I had an obligation to follow him? It seems a bit odd to me to base a ‘friendship’ on whether we follow each other online everywhere.

Now this particular person and I have never met in person. Granted, that wouldn’t be an immediate reason either way. I stalk follow several people I’ve never met daily. Heehee But, I also don’t feel any obligation to follow people I know on every site I’m on. Actually, if I know you in real life, I feel like I’m obligated even less.

Is this a thing? Is there something that has developed as some bizarre unwritten rule? I’ll be breaking it if it is but I’m just checking.

*
And on a related tangent but not the same person, if you block me [1]and we know each other in the biblical sense because we have differences in political views, be sure to block me again when you get kicked off of Facebook and create a new profile whining about getting kicked off for posting nudie pics. It saves us both the awkwardness of being recommended in the “People who may now” section…

References

References
1 and we know each other in the biblical sense