Drink Buddy

A mute turns the volume down. A block removes you from the room.

Most products present these as two strengths of one action, which teaches people to reach for the wrong one. They do different jobs: one manages what reaches you, the other manages who can reach you, and only one of them is a safety control.

Three actions, three different jobs

A mute manages what reaches you. A block manages who can reach you. Leaving manages whether there is anything to reach at all.

The rule the product holds itself to is that the interface must never present the first two as two strengths of one thing. Presented on a scale, people reach for the milder one out of politeness in exactly the situation where the milder one does nothing.

What each one actually changes

Same two people, two different controls, almost nothing in common.

	Mute	Block
The friendship	Untouched	Deleted, and pending requests cancelled both ways
Their content in your feed	Silenced	Gone — you cannot find each other at all
Their reactions and comments on your check-ins	Still possible	Not possible
Your locations	Unchanged	Hidden, whatever the mode says
Can they tell?	No	No — every surface answers as if you never existed
What it is for	Noise	Safety

Why a block leaves nothing to detect

This is the same reasoning that governs unavailable locations, applied to people.

There is no notification and no screen.: Nothing tells the other person, and no part of the interface exposes a state that only a blocked account would see.
The errors are identical to a missing account.: Profile, feed and username search all answer not-found. A blocked account and an account that never existed are indistinguishable from the outside.
Notifications are dropped at delivery rather than at send.: Anything already in flight is discarded before it arrives, so a block does not leak through a push that was queued a second earlier.
The same principle governs location.: Ghost mode, not-selected, not-friends, blocked and stale all produce one identical response, because distinguishing them would answer a question that is dangerous to answer.

Seven days, and why not thirty

A deletion request opens a seven-day window. During it the account is invisible to everybody else, and it remains recoverable by you.

Thirty days would be the conventional choice and was rejected for a specific reason: requesting deletion already requires a fresh sign-in, so the window is not defending against somebody else acting on a stolen session. It is defending against your own regret, and regret about leaving a social app surfaces in days rather than weeks.

That is also why signing in does not cancel the request on its own. Someone coming back to look at what is left has not necessarily changed their mind, and treating a login as a reversal would take the decision away from them.

What this page does not cover

Named so that nothing here is read as the complete account.

How to actually request deletion, step by step. That is the account deletion page, which is the compliance surface for it and is kept as the single source.
Exactly which records are erased and which are anonymised, which belongs with the same page.
The four location visibility modes, beyond the fact that a block overrides all of them.
How reporting works, which is a separate route from either blocking or muting.

Questions

Will someone know if I block them?

No. There is no notification, no screen and no error they could distinguish from your account never having existed. Profile, feed and username search all answer not-found in both directions.

What is the difference between muting and blocking?

A mute is a volume control: it silences what reaches you through the graph and leaves the friendship and their ability to interact with you intact. A block is a safety control: it deletes the friendship, cancels pending requests both ways, hides your locations regardless of mode, and makes you mutually unfindable.

If I unblock someone, do we become friends again?

No. The friendship was deleted rather than paused, so reconnecting means a new request that the other person has to accept.

Can I change my mind after asking to delete my account?

Yes, within seven days, and it has to be a deliberate cancellation. Signing in during the window does not cancel anything on its own.