I never understood why this happens in Mastodon. I follow a guy that posts super interesting stuff. I wanted to know who he follows, because some of them might interest me as well.
But although he follows 48 people, I see none of them. And I can see only 3 people that follow him.
@bighi something something activitypub
@kai Had similar thoughts.
@bighi I can't put it together completely, but a Mastodon server follows a certain routine when and how much information should be requested from another server. This is influenced by whether somebody from your server is already following somebody from the other server. Also it is modulated by the server block list, afaik.
@bighi Some users change their mastodon profile settings to hide their follows, myself included.
@unicornfarts Thanks. That might explain this case when I see no one.
Now I only have to understand when someone follows 100 people and I can see like 15 of them.
@bighi true, that is odd. I don't know what would cause that, sorry :)
@techbalion @unicornfarts Not mutual follows. Someone mentioned they might be on my instance.
@bighi @unicornfarts could be your instance blocks their instances so they are blocked by default
@bighi when I visit someone's profile on Instagram, the fact that they are followed by 25 other people that I already follow is a pretty good indicator.
@kai Hey, when did I unfollow you? I was thinking you've been too quiet for a long time. Mistake corrected.
@bighi haha, no worries
@bighi I think if you view their profile on their instance then you can see all their followers?
@groovestomp That works! Why did I never think of it? Thank you.
@bighi glad I could help!
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@bighi if you go to their profile on their instance, you see the full list I think
@bighi are the 3 are all on the same server as you?
@ehashman I didn’t check, but that’s possible. I think you’ve nailed it. One of the 3 that showed up on the list was myself. Fosstodon is not a very small instance, it wouldn’t be weird to find 2 other people in a list of a hundred followers.
@bighi I think this is just a quirk of activitypub. The only follows immediately available for retrieval are the ones your instance knows about.
I am rather happy with this feature since it reduces the guilt-by-association you see increasingly happen in online discourse these days. This said, I do think it should an option to make this public or not by the user (with the default off).
That is the "worst" part of Mastodon, to me, when compared to Twitter.
I find that smart people usually follow other smart people and that is, to me, a very good "recommendation system" of sorts.