I still don’t understand the distinction between “friends” and “follows”. Are “friends” just followers who follow each other? Or are they just two identical lists with different names?
I was somewhat cynically thinking of making it like this:
Who should get to add someone to your list?
But the original topic was about notifications so maybe this kind of off-topic…
the status quo is both by mutual agreement, not “the other person”
If someone clicks here:
they immediately show up on my list:
I can only remove people, not add them.
Those are friend requests; they’re not part of your friends list
So maybe the real change at the end of all this discussion should be to simply change the list name from “Friends” to “Reverse friends” and call it a day 
Edit: seriously though please let’s not forget about disabling those hurtful notifications!
Followers are one-way, friends are two-way. Think Twitter vs. Facebook.
I think the OP was about notifications sent when someone denies a friend request. My thought is that the best “fix” would be to not require confirmation by the second party at all (the follower model)
This just goes back to it being bad UX if the sender doesn’t get notified the request has been declined. If they get offended on a friend request being denied, that’s their problem; noone is obligated to accept any friend request whatsoever
I think Discord has an Accept and Ignore button for friend requests. If people want to have or want to share additional information about the friend request, they can just use DMs for that.
If I want to let others know that I declined their request or why, I can just tell them.
there’s actually three different relationships statuses on Facebook; Friend, Follow, and Fan.. I’ll ignore the Fan part since it’s relatatively irrelevant, as OGS has no particular status for commercial accounts.. This is the best summary I could find on the differences there..
“On Facebook, “friending” someone creates a mutual connection where both users can see each other’s posts and send messages, while “following” allows one user to see another’s public posts without needing mutual approval. Following is a one-sided relationship, meaning the follower can see updates without the followed user seeing theirs.”
why I argue to keep the friend list; even though, in the current setting, there is no benefit of having a whitelisted contact, the framework is in place to establish some limitations, as mentioned above; removing a framework because it has no function, also removes the possibility to add function to it.
At current there’s plenty of chaos, like
so, at best, in the current setting, the friends list is just a list of contacts (which is very useful since the search function is very limited (only shows top10 results, requiring remembering the full username or being lucky in the results))
so, since the argument then becomes, what is the point of differentiating between contact lists, like friends or follow, (barring the possibilities to implement further functionality), would be for oversight reasons.. I would certainly like to follow all the pros, many of the bot accounts, and the tournament accounts, but still have easy access to my two way relations on my friends list, to maybe play some friendly game or such..
but, to reiterate for a third time; my only real opinion on the matter is i would be sad to lose the friends list..
We’ve put in place “the minimum change to address the really valid concern”.
Now we have the option to send a notification, or not, when declining friend requests.
The default is to not-send one.
This doesn’t address all the great questions in this thread about “what really is this feature anyhow?”, “is it the right feature” etc … and to be honest, those need their own thread 
But at least we can all now quietly decline if we want 
let’s hope it works, otherwise I just sent out about 40 notifications..
but, friend list is finally visible again!
