1. Both follow directions to resume working automatically.

Rational: Blocking might have be done for "temporary pausing", accidentally, or whatever. Having to reset the following relationship mode would be seem counter-intuitive.

accidentally hit the "block" button

Or hit in rage that one regrets a moment later.

@Michael Vogel the way you are describing it, it is called "mute".
Blocking always ends a relationship on every other social network.
Creating a new definition here leads to further confusion in comparison to all other networks.

@Hypolite Petovan

Thank you all for your input, I personally am agreeing with @hoergen based on the behavior on other social media platforms I've been using (Twitter, Facebook) where blocking cuts all ties, but it seems Friendica users have different expectations. This discrepancy is an issue because by design we expect people from other social media platforms to move to Friendica.

Technically, all the cases are easy to implement, but we will need to explain this discrepancy in the interface and even with a well thought-out pop-up confirmation message, I'm not sure it will be enough to clear all the confusion, especially from people using apps based on the Mastodon API where the expectation is 4.

Forcing someone to unfollow me is a critical feature even if I don't use it much-

This is especially true for accounts with approval where you may just not want someone to see your private posts anymore

It's not just wrong it's noticably broken to do anything but terminate everything

we have got "mute" and "block" and both doesn't change something in the relationship.

What does 'mute' do ? Is this a new feature, @Michael Vogel ?

At the moment I can only see 'Block' 'Ignore' 'Delete'.

Yes. Soft-blocking (force-unfollow) with a block+unblock is a well-known maneuver, so we probably should accept that we live in a society of pre-existing social networks with certain behaviors.

So does this mean we are a bunch of technical geeks without a clue what happens outside the world of Friendica?

@Hypolite Petovan @Michael Vogel @hoergen Oh cool.

If everything is somehow clear to the user what it does, it sounds like doing the right thing might work then.

It doesn't really matter, we have no control over the messaging inside Mastodon-compatible apps, so we have to go with assumptions about Mastodon behaviors.

On the contrary in the Friendica frontend we have 100% control so we can do anything and inform users as such.

If they were using a specifically Friendica-compatible app, of course, but since we're piggy-backing off of the Mastodon ecosystem, I believe we have to take Mastodon behaviors into account.

Last but not least, many Friendica users (myself included) come from other platforms, whether it is Facebook, Twitter or even... Mastodon possibly. And all of these have in common the same behavior for blocking. So we just can't expect Friendica users to know exactly how blocking works in Friendica since it's different from every other social media platforms. This discrepancy is fine in the Friendica frontend where we can spell the actual behavior for users, but it is different in the Mastodon-compatible (or Twitter-compatible) apps that we can't control.