Discussion
Hey y'all. Does the follower count matter to you ? And do you use it as a measurement of how trustworthy someone is here on Mastodon?
I'm just curious. I know I can look it up but I like having additional source of info.
Boosts aren't mandatory but appreciated. Besides I'll make my own conclusions eventually...
@altlazybear at a certain point I started getting recommended on the mastodon dot social "recommended accounts" feed that new accounts are shown when signing up. And once that happened my follows *skyrocketed*, and kept skyrocketing, and I'm just about certain 9 out of 10 of my followers past…I dunno, maybe 15,000, have been spam bots. I block the obvious ones but there's so many and the template for a parked spam bot looks a lot like a low-interest user who signs up & only posts once. By design
@altlazybear which is a way of saying no I don't trust follower counts because I've seen just how easy they are to inflate on fedi
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Big no to both. Some Fediverse implementations, like the one I develop (#snac), does not publish follower nor following counts by default.