The people you follow ist stored in a single note on the relays. So a client just has to find the latest note of that kind to retrieve that list.
To get the people following you, a client has to find all notes of that kind referencing you. So these are many and possibly distributed on different relays.
Thank you for the explanation 🙏👍
I'm no dev... but that sounds counter-intuitive... why does the "follows-you" count have to be done this way?
#AskNostr
Because anyone somewhere that decides to follow you just publishes that fact to some relays. There is no central point where that information is stored.
A client may cache the count and list of accounts following you and update that the next time you use it. It could even generate notifications from that and I've seen that in some client a while ago.
