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Right, but this is where the confusion is i think: a rule that says all blocks must signal when coupled with very low hash rate enforcement effectively guarantees a chain split.
If miners find a non bip110 compliant and then begin building new blocks on this, non soft fork nodes follow along happy as clams, but bip110 nodes behave very much like a hard fork.
I think I'm just being silly about definitions here, but there is something in this that I keep seeing in the discourse around bip110.
I think a lot of casual bitcoiners associate soft forks with compatibility -- as in we will all be on the same chain whether we enforce it or not. Maybe this is a very naive view, but I think it is widespread.
The reality here is that a soft fork is completely incompatible with any miner not enforcing it. Nodes follow the heaviest chain, unless they are bip110, in which case they proceed on whatever chain they think is valid.
This dynamic is causing all kinds of mayhem on X
Yes, a minority enforced soft fork can cause a permanent chain split.
If hypothetically the entire network had been using RDTS rules and then someone made a software change that removed the mandatory signaling, this would remove a restriction and would be a hard fork. Only nodes that upgraded to this new software would be able to follow along.
It does not become a hard fork, because there is not a scenario where BIP110 nodes accept a block as valid that Core nodes reject as invalid.
If they change the proof of work mechanism to rescue a stalled chain, that would trigger a hard fork.