How To Follow People On Roblox

Following people on Roblox is one of those features that sounds obvious until you try to do it and realize the UI hasn't made it particularly straightforward.

I've been around Roblox since the early 2010s when the platform was basically a physics toy box, and honestly, the follow system has been a mess since day one. The core idea is simple: you want to see a player's activity in your News Feed and get notified when they update their profile or join a game. But the actual mechanics of making it happen involve navigating around a lot of half-baked design choices. Let me just walk you through how this works. There are several ways to follow someone on Roblox, and which one you use depends entirely on where you are when you find a person you want to follow. The most common route is through their profile page. You search for their username using the search bar at the top of any Roblox page, click into their profile, and there should be a blue Follow button right near their avatar and username. It usually says Follow when you're not following them and switches to Unfollow once you've added them to your list. Pretty standard stuff. The second route is from within a game. If you're playing alongside someone and you like their vibe, you can click their name in the leaderboard that appears on the left side of the screen during gameplay. This opens a small popup with their avatar, username, and a Follow button. I actually prefer this method most of the time because it's faster than leaving the game and navigating to their profile separately. One click, you're following them, back to playing.

There's also a third way that almost nobody uses but it's worth knowing about. You can follow someone directly from your Friends tab. Click the Friends icon (it looks like two stick figures) in the top navigation bar, then click on a player from your existing friends list. Their profile card opens and you'll see the Follow button there too. This is useful if you already have them as a friend and want to make sure you're getting their activity updates without having to hunt for their profile again.

How To Follow People On Roblox

Here's the part I wish someone had told me when I first started. The Follow system on Roblox is completely separate from the Friends system. They share some surface-level similarities but they operate on entirely different tracks. When you follow someone, you are not adding them as a friend. You will not be able to chat with them through the Friend Chat feature unless you also send them a friend request. You will only see their public activity in your News Feed. This distinction matters more than you'd think, especially if you're trying to figure out why someone isn't replying to your messages after you followed them. I ran into this exact problem back in 2014. I followed a bunch of content creators because I wanted to stay updated on their games. Then I got frustrated that I couldn't message them because my Follow relationship wasn't registering as a Friend relationship on their end. I spent probably two weeks wondering if I was doing something wrong before I finally just sent the friend request separately. It's a dumb separation of systems but it's been this way for over a decade and shows no sign of changing. Another thing that catches people off guard is the privacy settings. Not everyone can be followed. Some users disable the option to be followed in their privacy settings, and when you try to hit that Follow button on their profile, it just... isn't there. There's no error message telling you why. The button is simply absent. I've encountered this with several accounts over the years and the only workaround is to find another way to track that person, like watching their public group activity or checking their profile directly whenever you feel like it.

The News Feed itself is where all your follows end up. You can access it by clicking the bell icon in the top right corner of the screen. This shows you posts, game joins, and updates from everyone you're following. It's not real-time though. There's a delay that varies depending on server load, sometimes pushing notifications back by 10 to 30 minutes. If you're following someone and wondering why you haven't seen their latest activity yet, this is usually the reason. It's not a bug. It's just how Roblox handles push notifications at scale. If you want to manage who you're following, go to your Profile, scroll down to the Following section, and you'll see a complete list. From there you can unfollow anyone with a single click. There's no bulk unfollow option, which is annoying if you've accumulated hundreds of follows over the years like I have. I ended up writing a small script to automate the process, but that's against Roblox's terms of service so I don't recommend it. Just take your time clicking through the list. One more thing that most tutorials miss. You can only follow up to 100 people on Roblox. This limit has been in place for years and it's a hard cap. If you hit 100 and try to follow someone new, the button won't respond. I discovered this the hard way when I tried to follow a new developer whose games I enjoyed, and nothing happened. I had to go through my list and prune it down before I could add anyone new. The limit exists for server load reasons apparently, but it feels arbitrary and outdated given how many power users have far more than 100 connections on other platforms.

The mobile app handles following slightly differently than the desktop site. The Follow button is tucked inside a three-dot menu on the profile page rather than being prominently displayed. You have to tap the three dots, then tap Follow from the dropdown. It's a extra tap that probably slows down the process by about 5 seconds per follow, which doesn't sound like much until you're doing it ten times in a row. The mobile app also lags behind the desktop version when it comes to rolling out UI changes, so the button sometimes disappears temporarily during updates and reappears a few days later. I should also mention that the Follow feature doesn't work the same way for groups. Following a group is handled through the Group system, not the user follow system. If you're trying to follow a group's activity, you need to join the group first and then enable notifications in the group settings. There's no cross-over between following a player and following their group. I used to confuse these constantly and ended up missing a lot of group announcements because I was looking in the wrong notification panel. If you're building something that involves automated following or bulk operations, you're going to run into rate limiting very quickly. Roblox caps how many follow actions you can perform in a given time window. I once tried to follow about 50 accounts in rapid succession as part of a project and got temporarily blocked from following anyone for roughly 24 hours. The block wasn't communicated clearly either. The Follow button just stopped working and there was no error message explaining what was happening. I only figured out what went wrong after reading through some old forum threads where other people had hit the same wall.

For most people though, the process is straightforward enough that they'll never encounter any of these edge cases. Find someone's profile, hit the Follow button, check your News Feed to confirm it worked. That's it. The system isn't perfect, it has grown more complex over the years without much cleanup, but it gets the job done if you know where to look for the button and you understand that following and friending are two different things on this platform.