This morning I was reading someone explain why “soft-blocks” (blocking someone to stop them from following you, then unblocking them so it's hard for them to see what you did) don't work right now on #Bluesky, because a “block” and a “follow” are both things that are owned by individuals. I can block you, and I own (and publicly declare) that block, but I can't impact your “follow”. You own that, and I can't touch it.

So that was all very interesting but it made me realize I don't actually know how blocks work in a Masto-alike (or #ActivityPub generally) network, so I started bopping around looking stuff up. Almost immediately, I found this Understanding ActivityPub series from @crepels@mastodon.social. It's a great series, but the test instance is spectacular. Here's how blocks and follows interact between two #Mastodon instances: