Until some time ago (a few weeks or so), I'm pretty sure I could still come across comments written by users I blocked. I know that because I started to tag the users because of that. Now I've noted that not only comments by blocked users are completely hidden from me, but the entire thread starting from them, including responses by other users, is invisible.

I'm not really sure if that's the intended behavior (and if it's piefed or my instance that does it).

I don't know if Piefed is supposed to handle things differently, but on lemmy, you do neither see posts of users you've blocked nor their comments, including their whole reply chain. The only indicator is that the displayed number of replies to a post is larger than the number of replies that are displayed.

Do you have any instances blocked? I’m getting an impression it started applying to users recently. Not complaining, that’s what I wanted to achieve.

Only users and communities. I'm not really complaining if it changed, I'd just like to understand the feature. That said, I usually thought blocking is about preventing interaction, and not about hiding content.

Yes it's supposed to be the entire thread and always has been.

Were you using a different client app, before? Possibly some apps do the blocks client-side and behave differently.

Okay, thanks for the confirmation. I'm still using the same app, but I guess it's possible something changed with an update of it.

AfaIk, as the fediverse has no means for preventing somebody from fetching content, unlike it used to be e.g. on Twitter, blocking someone is not mutual and essentially just hiding their content (interaction) from your view.
If you block a user, it doesn't hinder the user from reading your content or interacting (voting, commenting) with it.
Instance wise, as e.g. my home instance feddit.org is blocked by dbzer0, their users cannot see content (posts, comments, votes?) from feddit.org users, while for the other direction everything is visible. You just have to keep in mind that you would reply to a dead mailbox and as a result, I assume, the reply would remain localised on your instance.

Wait huh? Well that's not great. That's not really what I would want blocking to be. I guess I'll stick to marking the users with notes instead.

Previously, there was a bug in the API that didn't hide comments from blocked users https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/1608

Oh, that's probably it! Fixed four weeks ago, that fits with my experience. Thank you!

It'd be nice to have some granularity here.

Like options.

Block posts? Check

Block comments? Uncheck

Maybe instead of block, an auto hide feature, or auto collapse comments. So the rest of the comment tree is viewable

That's how it works on Lemmy. I would have expected Piefed to do it better and simply hide the blocked user, and not everything in reply to the blocked user since it has so many other things done better than Lemmy.