The folks who are saying it's just about blocking different opinions are missing the plot here.
Both myself and some other's have been dragged into outside drama here and actively harassed and targeted before, and having a better safe-guard against that would be nice. The mods generally do a good job of deleting/shutting down said harassment when it crops up, but there's very little in place at the moment to prevent a continuation of it when it happens.
There has been pretty alarming stuff happening in the past here, like multiple attempts to brigade my private Discord server and rather explicate things being sent unwanted to friends of mine, there are genuine reasons to ignore well beyond differing opinions here.
Something like this doesn't seem fixable by having two users ignore each other. If there's an altercation and it's set to where two people can't see each other's posts, and one or both of them is continuing to escalate things in DMs or through attempted contact or harassment outside of the forum, you can't fix that with just telling them to ignore each other. At that point, in a generalized sense the best course of action would surely be to ban the person/persons continuing to escalate things from the site. A bad apple spoils the whole bunch, and in my opinion it's likely that someone who is harassing one person will be toxic in the future to others as well.
For more simple disagreements, ignoring their stuff seems sufficient to me. Sure, you may know that their posts are being ignored, but you're not completely erasing knowledge of their existence on the site just from that. Do they write articles? Do other users reference them? If nothing else, won't it show you when the ignored person is online in the list of online users section, or show their profile picture when it's their birthday? Perhaps not, I haven't had anything more than some shitposting disagreements on a tattoo thread, so I don't have firsthand experience.
Let's think of the website like a school. If you have disagreements with someone, or you stop being friends, or whatever it is, if you can't make amends, you avoid each other. You still know the other person exists. You may see them down the hall or in the lunchroom, maybe leaving school at the end of the day. You may have even have mutual friends. But you don't congregate together with those mutual friends, and you don't acknowledge the other person unless absolutely necessary. You both continue to exist independently at that school as long as neither of you cause further problems. You live on with your differing opinions and viewpoints. You know they exist, but it doesn't ruin your day because you're not interacting with each other anymore. No further action is needed in theory.
What happens when things have escalated? There's a fight, or bullying or harassment. I guess I don't know what happens nowadays, but to me, it makes sense that there is intervention from the school staff(mods), or if really necessary, the principal(Spike). At the minimum, the bully has to accept the staff's terms to continue to keep attending class(using the forum). Ideally, they also apologize to the other person. If they cannot agree to this, or if they continue harassment afterwards, they get expelled(banned from the site). Period. If they can't resist the urge to harass someone else, that won't stop without intervention. That's the sort of thing ignoring can't deal with. They'll likely find a new target and continue the pattern. And then if they are harassing anyone outside of school(Discord, other forums, etc.) that's when it needs to be escalated appropriately.
I think it's fine to agree to disagree, and it's often inevitable. It's the risk of participating in discussion, and that is what we're here to do at the end of the day, right? Discuss stuff? It's not going to be perfect, because nothing is. That's the human experience. At the end of the day it should still be a mostly pleasant experience, and if it isn't, an attempt at addressing the situation is worth a shot. If it becomes a common thing that at least a few people need strong enough ignoring settings to not see a single trace of other people's existence, that to me indicates there's likely some deeper issue. Are these really isolated incidents? Or are a handful of aggressive people causing most of the problems?
