How is following someone on another server with Mastodon difficult? Or is that some sort of a meme now?
Similarly, local-to-your-instance links to a specific toot, vs. globally-accessible / canonical toot URLs.
Both can be resolved through the Search dialogue on Mastodon, but it took me a while to work that out myself.
Fully-transparent blocking tends to play to the interests of griefers, abusers, and trolls.
For many instances, blocks are listed on the /about/more page of the instance. Mind that you'd also have to check to see if the remote instance is blocking your own.