Counting follows is counting the number of contact lists you are on. Contact lists are large so relays will only allow you to pull so many at a time. To know how many people follow you is knowing every up to date contact list on every relay. Clients can’t really pull all of this information down, so depending which relays you are counting from you will get different numbers, but it will always be inaccurate. Follow counts are a centralized concept.
Discussion
I do like that I can see some of my followers with #damus (thanks Will & team). It's cool to look and see if anyone is posting cool stuff to follow back. I wonder if one day in the future there might be a way to easily find people who follow me that share interests and post somewhat frequently 🤞🤷♀️
How about as an addition to the follower list, the follower also sends a separate note tagged to the followed for notification?
It’s like comparing each others UTXO sets or dick size
'Follow counts are a centralized concept'
Surely this can be improved with a indexed, purpose built relay for follow lists. It doesn't matter what you think of the concept. People still want to know their follow count. It's not a centralized concept to want to gauge your reach.
Yes indexers are fine for this, but its hard to make core client features depend on single specialized servers which don’t have a spec. This is just asking for your app to stop working eventually. I try to avoid that as much as I can in damus.
People can also spam contact lists and fake the count (primal shows me as 1 million followers when it’s probably more like 200k), so i’m not sure if it will ever be accurate. I don’t like lying to users.
I totally understand that
Maybe this could be less intensive using Merkel roots?