my advice is check your settings and tick the box which allows new followers to automate an email then you can copy paste it into the top left corner of your screen in Mastodon and return, then you see the person and can follow back.

I finally went through my email notifications of who followed me and pasted each handle from there into mastadon and followed back. A bit of a pfaff but got it done. Hoping that as this platform develops that it fixes this situation to make it that we can simply scroll down the list and follow back. Also that we can choose our language environment to a preferred language rather than a regional auto one. :)