You can hide someone on Facebook without blocking them by using the Unfollow, Snooze, or Restrict features. These options allow you to control the visibility of content without severing the friendship or notifying the person.
While Facebook still doesn't allow you to hide certain friends from your friends list, you can, however, set up your Facebook privacy settings to either “Friends expect” or “ Specific friends,” which means that certain people won't be seeing your friends list and vice versa.
How do I “Take a Break” from someone on Facebook?
Essentially, soft blocking resets the relationship, making you online strangers again. It works on most platforms with a follow system, like Instagram, Twitter (X), Facebook, and Tumblr.
Unlike blocking, which creates a clear separation that the blocked user can detect, Restrict operates more discreetly, allowing you to limit someone's interactions with your content without them necessarily knowing they've been restricted.
Muting, hiding or restricting can provide good alternatives to blocking because abusers do not know that they've been muted, hidden, or restricted. Ultimately, only you can decide what feels right for you.
We won't tell them that you restricted them. They won't be able to see when you're online or if you've read their messages.
Some helpful tips to reduce the amount of hate in your Facebook feed: "Snooze" - when you snooze someone, you won't see their posts for 30 days. You remain "friends", and they won't know you snoozed them.
You can only control who can see your friends list on your profile. Your friends also control who can see their friendships on their own profiles. For example, if you set your friends list to Only Me, only you'll be able to see your full friends list on your profile.
No, you cannot see who specifically views your personal Facebook profile or page, and any third-party apps claiming to offer this are fake and potentially harmful; however, for business Pages, you can see general visitor numbers in Meta Business Suite, and you can infer activity from who interacts with your posts, but you can't see lurkers.
No, they won't be notified or alerted when you hide someone's post (or comment) on Facebook, so they won't know you did it.
Tap Hide contact.
Hiding someone is not the same as blocking them. People you hide will not be notified and you will still be able to search for and chat with them. To unhide someone, visit your Messenger privacy settings and tap Hidden contacts.
A ghost profile is a user account on social media or online platforms that lacks activity or personal engagement. Often created for various reasons—such as privacy, data collection, or spamming—these profiles typically have minimal information and may not reflect a real person.
Click Only me. This will hide your Facebook friend list from everyone. Alternatively, you can select Friends to make it visible to other friends, Friends except… to exclude some friends, or Specific friends to share with selected friends.
You can tell if someone restricted you on Facebook by checking their profile for only public posts, comparing what you see with a mutual friend's view, or noticing missing Messenger features like delivery receipts or call rings, as there's no direct notification, but rather signs like seeing only public posts or messages stuck on "sent" instead of "delivered," notes wikiHow, YouTube, and YouTube.
If you're looking for other ways to take a break from someone, you can change your profile picture or archive your message thread with their profile. Keep in mind that you can always block or unfriend someone's profile on Facebook.
How Do You Soft Block Someone? To soft block someone, go to their profile and block them. Wait a few moments, and then unblock them. The exact steps for blocking someone will depend on what platform you're using, whether that's Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, etc.
Steps
Another aspect to consider is the impact on direct messaging. The messages of restricted users are tucked away in a hidden requests folder, giving you the power to decide whether to engage or ignore. On the other hand, blocking someone means they won't be able to send you messages at all.
There are a couple of indicators that you may be blocked: