Is Deebo warming to idea of 49ers return?

In the generation of subtweets and subliminal messages on social media, there can be a lot to decipher on how people feel based on their activity on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok or some other platform.

And the bigger the celebrity — or, in this case, the better you are at football — the more people will notice.

It seems like sometime this week, Deebo Samuel decided to follow the 49ers back on Instagram, which 49ers Webzone first noticed Wednesday night.

Samuel had requested a trade from the 49ers a few weeks before the NFL Draft, which he went public with on April 20. It appeared timed to try and force a move to happen by the time the draft began.

The one signal that Samuel had sent publicly ahead of the request being reported was through Instagram, where he unfollowed the 49ers back on April 7. It’s a move that others in the NFL — most notably, Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray — have begun using as a negotiation tactic.

But after the NFL Draft’s first round came and went with no trade last Thursday, Samuel seems to have embraced that he won’t be traded. He made appearances at the NFL Draft last Friday donning a 49ers-colored red and gold hat (though the hat was a Seattle Mariners 2001 All-Star Game hat), he told free-agent wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. to “stop trolling” with random tweets about where Samuel was going and he’s now re-followed the team on Instagram.

Head coach Kyle Shanahan said last Friday that “nothing was remotely close to what we thought was fair” in any trade offers sent for Samuel and called the relationship with the superstar “great.”

Great or not, it surely has been a rocky spring in Santa Clara with their All-Pro “wide-back.”

But if you’re willing to take social media activity as an indication of how someone’s truly feeling — and you should always only do that with a degree of caution — then it appears like there may be a path to things getting patched up with Samuel and the 49ers.