Mastodon answers 422 when two first contacts from one actor race to create its account (ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid on the unique uri), and 409 while another worker holds its lock. A persona that followed two Mastodon accounts at once had one Follow refused that way; the job died on its first attempt and the persona waited on "requested" forever. Both answers are now retried twice on the usual backoff before they count as refusals. Found by the town (a village of 23 accounts on seven servers). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw