On a sidenote, although this probably isn't related: Mastodon servers (and servers running Mastodon forks like Glitch) cause another side-effect whenever they upgrade to 4.7.x Alpha.

Let's suppose someone on Mastodon (or Glitch or whatever fork) has followed you in the past. You had to make it a full contact so they were allowed to follow you, and their follow request was flagged as confirmed on their side.

However, you didn't really want to follow them. You didn't want them to clutter your stream with their uninteresting cruft. Instead of just not granting them permission to send you their stuff, you deleted the contact. From a Mastodon POV, this meant you unfollowed them, but you did not make them unfollow you. Hubzilla itself has a page with no link in the UI that lists your following contacts, and they remain there as well.

Interestingly, if they unfollow you, they still remain on the following contacts list.

Anyway, whenever a Mastodon server or a Mastodon fork server upgrades to 4.7 Alpha, and you have "following contacts" on that server that used to be full contacts (regardless of whether or not they actually still follow you), they all appear as new connection requests.

This has happened to me with "following contacts" on infosec.exchange (Glitch) when it upgraded. This has happened to me with "following contacts" on mastodon.online (vanilla) when it upgraded. This has happened to me with a few more servers when they upgraded.

Mind you, at least most of them didn't even actually follow me anymore. I've checked their following lists whenever I could, and I was not listed there.