@welshpixie I believe that "silence" means that you still have to approve follow requests even if your account is public, and their toots won't show up on the federated timeline. Otherwise it shouldn't be affected.
@fluffy Yeah, I'd like more detailed information than that though - will the posts of people on a silenced instance show up in hashtag searches? If a user on .art boosts an account from a silenced instance, but from an account they follow, will other users see it even if they're not following them?
@welshpixie @fluffy For the second question: yes. Explicitly boosted toots will not be affected by the silence.
There does seem to be a bug when you downgrade from a block to a silence, where previously-known accounts from that instance remain wholly blocked/suspended. At least in upstream Mastodon.
@fluffy @welshpixie Inbound follow requests *do* work for me, though I would not be surprised if this downgrade process was buggy in more than one (inconsistent) way either
@joepie91 @welshpixie Yeah new follow requests work for me, but I suspect that in the case of @Andy_P he'd been following me for a long time (following from twitter and then through a few instance migrations) and there was probably a stale one which had resulted in a follow where the request was dropped. He canceled his request and made a new one and that worked.