Very interesting—thank you for the education!
Is there a way to invert it and find the zombies from a compilied database for a specific npub, if one wanted to know how many of one’s followers were zombies?
Close, but not exactly. Your follow list is public data stored on the relays you connect to. Every time you connect to a relay, you’re sharing this list, and when you make updates to it by following or unfollowing users, your client submits an edited version of it by signing an event with your private key.
You can see all of your follows by going to this page without having to sign in. #PlebsVsZombies 🏹🧟♀🔪🧟♂ queries your follow list from the relays you connect to in order to determine the last time your follows were active, and based on that classifies them as zombies (by age of decomposition) or live users.
Sometimes relays contain conflicting or outdated information, because users can stop connecting to them, so there’s no guarantee the data is 100% accurate, but we do our best to find it all by searching in multiple passes, which helps eliminate zombie false positives.
https://listr.lol/npub1hqva2radggqltaj8n7vqpj9pkddc7lf6cmsuchm3dp4kr52syeqsrap4sd
Discussion
That’s literally what this app does.
I did not say it right. I mean, for a given npub, how many that npub’s followees are zombies?
Oh…you mean how many of your FOLLOWERS are zombies. Got it.
That's technically possible, but potentially resource draining, because once you get over a couple thousand followers, it would take a really long time to run the scan. There's also nothing you can do with this information, since you can't force another user to unfollow you, so there's not much of a point to doing this.