If You Block A Blog On Tumblr Does It Block It From Your Side Blogs As Well?

I've been suspicious about the way tumblr blocking works for primary and secondary blogs for a while, and I just got a chance to test it with chagrined . Turns out it's a) massively fucked up and b) faaaaascinating. Many people have probably investigated this before, but I haven't seen it, so.

Basically, tumblr treats primary and secondary blogs as two separate accounts for the purposes of blocking. Which is ... reasonable in some ways? But leads to a totally broken functionality in others.

We both tested it using primary and secondary tumblrs, and every time we tested it, only the specific blocked tumblr was ignored. E.g. I ignored chagrined 's primary, and could still see hir secondary in the tags, and ignored hir secondary, and could still see hir primary on my dash.

This is all very well and good if you use the ignore button the way I often do - "I don't want this person's spider posts in the black widow tag" - then, fine, just ignoring posts made by iheartspiders makes sense. But here's the catch: blocking/ignoring also makes my posts not show up on that user's dash and it prevents them from messaging me. But since tumblr treats primary and secondary accounts as separate, that reverse-blocking fails. There is no way to log in as my secondary account and block someone from there, so there is actually no way for me to remove my secondary account's posts from their dash. And depending on which of their accounts I ignore, they may still be able to message any of my accounts.

And since I can only follow/like/message from my primary account, if someone else blocks my secondary account that does absolutely nothing to my ability to follow/like/message - all it does is take my secondary blog's posts out of the tags and notes.

Which makes this weirdly varying blocking depending on whether you block a primary or secondary account. Like so:

I ignore a primary account: they can't see my primary's posts on their dash, but can still see my secondary's; I don't see their primary account's posts in the tags, but can still see their secondary account's posts; I don't see their notes, but can still see their secondary account's notes; there is no way for me to remove my secondary's posts from their dash. However, they can't ask either my primary or secondary account! The one and only place where tumblr treats those two accounts as the same! No, I don't know either. Reasons. I triple-checked because it was so weird. (And as a result can say that those asks do go into your inbox, they're just invisible, so if you un-ignore an account later, the old asks will be there, but with no new-message flag for a couple days. Suddenly, later, there will be a new message flag!)

I ignore a secondary account: they can still see my primary and secondary's posts on their dash; I don't see the secondary account's posts in the tags, but still see the primary account's posts; I don't see their secondary account's notes, but I can still see their primary account's notes and replies; they can still message either of my accounts from their primary account; there is no way for me to remove my secondary's posts from their dash.

So if someone plans to comment on posts in a way they think other people might find irritating (e.g. reblogging shippy art with all the reasons the ship sucks) or make posts people tend to complain about (e.g. posting lots of asks to a tag), it is in their interests to do that from a secondary account. Every single person who posts shippy art or hangs out in the tag could block the account doing the reblogging, but they'd all still be followable/messagable by the main account. If someone wants to be essentially unblockable on tumblr, all they have to do is make a secondary account and never use their primary account for anything except following - tumblr doesn't make apparent the connections between sideblogs and primary blogs, so that user would be basically invisible.

Or, for me, since I like the idea of blocking, it's an unfortunate gap in communication - I reblog art to secondary tumblr with image descriptions, which annoys some people a lot (every ask I have ever received is about image description, some quite vehemently opposed), and I've always assumed that people who don't like it would block my account and vanish from my dash. But it turns out they can't block me, actually, so it's totally plausible that I still follow people who find my reblogging infuriating. All blocking does for them is remove the notifications of my reblogs. I'd rather not reblog from people if it will only piss them off, but I have no way of knowing if anyone is trying to block me.

We probably missed some possibilities in testing, and it's always plausible that one of us is affected by a weird tumblr bug, because who isn't. But it's pretty weird, isn't it?