Public by default
A new account is public: the profile, and anything posted publicly, is visible to anyone including people who are not signed in. That is the correct default for a platform people arrive at from search, but it is worth knowing rather than discovering.
Public also means indexable. Search engines can reach a public profile, which is a different and longer-lived kind of visibility than someone scrolling past.
What a hidden account changes
Hiding an account narrows its reach to friends. It is a visibility control: the account still works normally, you can still post, and your friends see everything as before.
It is deliberately separate from suspension, which is an enforcement action that stops an account being used at all. They are different things with different causes, and one does not imply the other.
Because hiding is friends-only rather than fully private, the honest way to think about it is: people you have mutually agreed to can see this, and nobody else can.
Verify from the outside
Open your profile in a private browsing window while signed out. That is what the public sees, with no cached assumptions.
Do this after every visibility change. A settings screen tells you what you asked for; the signed-out view tells you what happened.
Common questions
- Does hiding my account delete anything?
- No. It changes who can reach your profile going forward. Nothing you posted is removed, and reversing it restores the previous visibility.
- Is a hidden account the same as a suspended one?
- No, and the difference matters. Hiding is a visibility choice you make. Suspension is an enforcement action that locks the account. They are tracked separately.