both those options are bad UX and papercuts that cause me to not want to use it. if you "just" have to take a second step or prepare your environment in a particular way for the most important part of a social network, following someone, that's a dealbreaker.
>maybe it just show how little someone else's content is important to you
i mean that's pretty much it. i barely care about the whole thing, but if it's easy enough it's a bit of decent time waster. twitter was easy enough, adding the tiniest of steps is enough to make me decide i don't really care.
Mastodon's UX isn't bad, it's just not actively pressuring me into interacting more than i really want to, the way twitter generally did/does.