Soft Fork
You can think of soft forks as upgrades to the existing Bitcoin blockchain. These upgrades go through a lot of testing, discussion and approval by the whole network of nodes and miners before they can be implemented on the Bitcoin network due to its decentralised nature.
Once approval has been signaled from all involved, the soft fork will come into effect at a specific time (block in the chain) and the Bitcoin blockchain will continue on this new upgraded version.
Hard forks on the other hand result in splitting of the chain so there’s a new one and old one, usually due to conflict rather than collaboration.
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