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@ Dikaios1517
2025-05-23 18:02:49
Follower count is a notoriously difficult metric to track and impossible to track with 100% accuracy. I recommend only using it to get a general idea of how many followers you have at minimum. The actual number will be higher, but impossible to determine.
Regarding Primal in particular, the fluctuation +/- 40 or so all the time may be due to some follower bots that have been repeatedly following and unfollowing Nostr profiles.
In general, though, the difficulty of counting followers accurately is due to the way Nostr clients have to try and figure out how many followers you have. When it comes to giving a count of how many people you follow, that's easy because there is just one list, saved to your relays, that has all of the npubs you follow on it. The Nostr client just tallies up the number of npubs that show on the latest version of that list. Done. But when it comes to counting the number of npubs who follow you, your Nostr client has to reach out to ALL the relays it can and ask them for any follow list that has your npub on it, remove duplicates, and then tally them up. Now, some of those relays may not be reachable. Some of them may send back an error. Most likely, though, your Nostr client simply won't reach out to every relay in existence that has a follow list with your npub on it.
Then there is the more recent issue that there might be folks who follow you by some other means than adding you to their follow list. They might have your npub on another type of list that they can view as a feed, and that list might be encrypted. They also might just use a relay that aggregates notes from a list of npubs, or from a web-of-trust you happen to be indluded in, so even though they don't follow you directly, they are effectively following you, because your notes show up in their feed.
For all of these reasons and more, follower counts are inaccurate and should just be treated as a baseline approximation.