Friends, followers and everyone else
A friend connection is mutual — both people agreed to it. That mutual link is what most privacy settings are built on, because it is the only relationship where both sides have consented.
Following is one-directional. Someone following you has said they want to see your public posts; you have not said anything about them. Treat a follower as a member of the public who has opted in, not as someone you know.
Everyone else is the public. If a post is public, this is its real audience — not the people you pictured while writing it.
How the feed decides what to show
A feed is ranked, not chronological. It weighs how recent something is, how close your connection to the author is, and what you have engaged with before.
The practical consequence is that posting more often does not straightforwardly mean being seen more. Two posts competing for the same audience on the same day can suppress each other.
It also means your own feed is not a reliable sample of what exists. Not seeing someone's posts is more often ranking than absence.
Check, do not assume
The reliable way to know what a stranger sees is to look at your profile while signed out, or from an account that is not connected to you. Settings describe intent; the signed-out view shows the result.
Do this after any change to your visibility settings rather than trusting that the change did what you expected.
Common questions
- Does posting more often get me seen more?
- Not reliably. Posts compete for the same audience, so two in a day can each reach fewer people than one would have. Consistency over weeks does more than volume in a day.
- Why can I not see a friend's post?
- Usually ranking rather than anything deliberate. Visiting their profile directly shows everything they have shared with you, which is the quickest way to tell the difference.