At the top of stats page it says "Trusted users: 186135" - that's the total of trusted pubkeys. 30 million is overall pubkeys. Relay doesn't return events from low-quality pubkeys, but the COUNT returns pre-calculated counters which don't ignore spam, that's why Will has a million followers.
Is it me or the stats on https://nostr.band/ always felt disjointed in some way?
nostr:npub1xdtducdnjerex88gkg2qk2atsdlqsyxqaag4h05jmcpyspqt30wscmntxy how many real users do you see according to the trust rank? The stats page says there are over 30 million, but it's hard to imagine that much of even spam, but for sure if there are so many it's definitely most spam, but then there are 50k active users, and the trust page says you don't return low-quality events on the relay interface, but nostr:npub1xtscya34g58tk0z605fvr788k263gsu6cy9x0mhnm87echrgufzsevkk5s has over a million followers when you do a COUNT query, so that means we have at least a million high-quality, trusted, users, but only 50k are active?
But then Nostr userbase has actually grown -- not much, but did -- over the past year, and yet his follower count was already over a million an year ago, so that doesn't make sense.
Discussion
"real users" != "trusted pubkey" - I bet huge number of real people joined and never got any trust rank bcs they never posted or never gained any reactions and then quit.
i have about 200 followers and most users on NOSTR that ever contribute any content of value know who i am.
i would estimate the real number of valuable NOSTR users at about 10,000. by valuable i mean users that post more than B1tc0in Sp@m.
this is actually not bad when you consider for example that Harvard has 20,000 students.
quality over quantity.
Thank you for explaining, this makes a lot of sense now.