@Alanna There are two kinds of pubs you connect to: (1) those that you manually joined by adding invites, (2) any pub that your computer 'discovers' in the social graph.

The second type is the more confusing type, and it's a decision done a long time ago that we'll likely revert. Basically everytime someone joins a pub, they also automatically under the hood publish a msg that announces to the social graph that this pub exists, and other peers pick that up and attempt to connect to that pub.

Unfollowing pubs basically has the effect of pushing pubs more distant to you in hops count. For instance, I am at hop 1 to you because there is only one "follow" distance between you and me. But if you don't follow a pub, then the closest it can be is hops 2 (you follow person X who follows the pub). One of the benefits of not following a pub is that you won't be hops-2-distant with strangers anymore, you'll be hops-3-distant, if those strangers are connecting to a hops-2-distant pub. Overall this means that you'll connect to less random pubs, only to pubs you already know. But I think it's a somewhat weak action, not too effective at pruning which pubs you connect with. I think we just to change the code so that there are more reasonable defaults, and specially once you block a pub you should never connect to it anymore (but currently you would connect!).