Those that think this way also don’t know that Twitter and any other company also can’t even be sure of the follower count. Even in a centralized service. Developers introduce hacks and bugs to get things done, intentional and unintentional. How many times have we heard complaints from people saying they suddenly “lost a lot of followers”. Because they eliminated bots was one explanation, but knowing which accounts are bots is not a perfect science, and there is certainly room for the follower counting process to have bugs. Many of us work at software companies, we all know where skeletons are. I have worked at companies that disagreed internally about the number of clients we had. Depends on what your logic is when running the query and there is room for debate on what an accurate count is. Do you count all existing users? Do you only count active users? Etc etc. In twitter’s case there just isn’t anyone else to argue with.