To reproduce:
You'll see an error message stating that API requests have been disabled for that site, and the site is not removed from your following list.
I tried to reproduce this in the web reader and was able to successfully unfollow the site. This suggests we need to update which endpoints the app calls to unfollow a site.
@nbradbury
cc @aerych as this is present in the iOS reader as well.
https://github.com/wordpress-mobile/WordPress-iOS/issues/6457
Notes: on Android the user simply sees a toast stating "unable to unfollow this blog." The endpoint is v1.1 sites/{site}/follows/mine/delete. The status code of the response is 403.
If we use v1.2 of that endpoint, we get a 404. The site still isn't removed from the user's followed sites, though.
Slack discussion with the reader squad proposed the solution is for the backend to treat unfollowing a deleted site as a successful unfollow. This really is a backend issue, but I'm leaving it open until I hear it's resolved on the backend.
Update: this turned out to be a problem to fix on the backend, so it's up to the mobile apps to work around it by calling /read/following/mine/delete?url= when unfollowing by ID fails with a 403.
Most helpful comment
Slack discussion with the reader squad proposed the solution is for the backend to treat unfollowing a deleted site as a successful unfollow. This really is a backend issue, but I'm leaving it open until I hear it's resolved on the backend.