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 kind of?
Like, I don't really care about the difference between a few dozen and a few thousand. But very few or no followers suggests a spam bot.
@jetlagjen @altlazybear same here. I actually don’t engage much with people that have thousands of followers, it’s usually less personal at that point anyway. Talking into the void kind of thing.
How do you distinguish a new user or a "not really active user" from a bot ?
@stethewwolf @altlazybear through all the other clues available.
Number and content of posts and replies, how I came to interact with them, completeness of profile...
Oct 15, 2026, 2:50 PM@altlazybear I take follower count as an indicator of trustworthiness on any social media, but perhaps not as you may have intended. The vast majority of accounts with a large number of followers spread misinformation so I usually avoid them.
@altlazybear
Yes it matters in the sense that very low follower numbers is indicative of a potential problem. But once youre past some small number of real people following you its all good. more isnt really better.
@altlazybear cannot answer without revealing ingredient of the secret sauce I use to approve follow requests
Oct 15, 2026, 3:03 PM@altlazybear I don't think trustworthy is an applicable dimension for me most of the time. (Factual information should come with a source and/or I actually know the person and their credentials.)
I tend to stay away from accounts with >~1k followed because it starts to feel like commenting on a broadcast medium and not human interaction at that point. And I try to give accounts with <~10 followers the benefit of the doubt but will be quicker to disengage from them if it's not feeling fullfiling.
What I do often glance at, however, is the ratio of replies to boosts to original toots; phanpy helpfully displays this. I'm looking for thoughtful conversation. For that a balance of toots and replies with a sprinkle of boosts seems to often be a good sign.
I currently have 1.5k followers and I am definitely here for the personal conversations. This place is pretty much my entire social life; most of the time, I have no one else outside my family to chat with.
Which, by the way, is part of why I tend to panic at the thought of Fedi becoming illegal. If that happens, I will have almost no one to talk to…
Oct 15, 2026, 6:52 PM@argv_minus_one For sure! My 1k was a heuristic, not a hard and fast rule. I also follow someone on here with 15k followers and have had lovely interactions with them to the point that we now have met irl! But, there also folks with big accounts where it turns into internet-personality-broadcast media. So it's something I glance at and take on board. Like I said, the ratio of toots/replies/boosts is often more important to me. Ultimately it's about the interaction. All this extra data mostly informs my expectations / how much leeway I give … all in a very wishy-washy non-rigerous way.
@altlazybear They don't mean much to me. I am wary of people with high follower accounts who follow very few. Some balance is nice.
@altlazybear there's nuance.. if someone with like... < 8 followers sends a follow request i'm going to automatically reject it, and then after that it scales from how long they've been on fedi... like if they've been on fedi for 2 years and only have ~20 followers... whyfor??
In my case it's because I post personal stuff and don't want people I don't know following me.
@tripplehelix understandable, although you do know Bad Actors can just make a fedi client that listens to activity pub and doesn't respect visibility settings and still slurp up all your followers-only posts right?
@altlazybear
@old_angry_queer @tripplehelix
Could you elaborate? Are you saying that the server will send followers-only posts to people who are not following me?
Mastodon does warn me that anyone can follow me in order to see my followers-only posts, but that's not the same thing as people being able to see those posts even without following me.
@argv_minus_one
okay, i'm not an expert in that i've never coded a mastodon platform from scratch but my understanding is:
@argv_minus_one
1) a server connects to activitypub (big firehose of everything on fediverse)
2) when a user requests their TL the server curates that for them based on who they follow or for the public timeline things that are marked as public
but there's nothing keeping someone from writing a script that connects to activitypub and filtering "all posts by @argv_minus_one" and not choosing to respecting your visibility settings. so they could see everything yes.
amirite @tobi ?
like this is basically how the AI bros are scraping fedi as i understand it.
It's my understanding that a server will only receive my follower-only posts in the firehose if that server hosts at least one user who follows me, and I will be notified if someone on that server follows me.
But I could be wrong, which is why I ask.
@altlazybear What matters the most to me is engagement with people asking questions. If you wrote that Medicine X results in a 30% reduction in Disease Y, and you didn't respond to follow-up questions, I won't trust you as a source of information. However, if someone asked you for a source and you responded with a link to a medical journal article, I'll trust you more.
Oct 15, 2026, 4:18 PM@altlazybear I usually trust my gut. Who is following someone is usually a better gauge than a number of followers. I also look at things like age of account, how many people they are following, and some of their general engagement (Posts and replies).
When I need to decide whether to follow someone, I mainly look at what they've posted recently. Is it interesting? Is it problematic?
When I need to decide whether to trust someone, then I'm looking at their ideology, affiliations, and past interactions with me (if any).
Low follower count doesn't mean much to me absent other information, because there are a lot of potential reasons for a follower count to be low, some of which are perfectly innocent.
Oct 15, 2026, 4:57 PM@altlazybear "it's complicated" to the first question, no to the second
as in, follower count is less important as an isolated stat than it is in relation to follow count. specifically how far apart they are. but also, if both are off in the high four figures or more, i'm likely to take that as an indication that they don't necessarily value mutuality
@altlazybear@mas.to I don't even exactly know how many followers I have
@altlazybear I look at follow count when deciding if I should approve a follow but that's it
And it's not a case of "more is better " but more "someone following a lot of people but with little followers themselves is probably a bot or a scam"
@altlazybear I will read a bunch of posts and replies and then decide whether I care about them, and if I do, I will request to allowme to follow them.
If the button isn't "request to follow", I ain't gonna click it.
@altlazybear
I only notice follower count if it is very low. Otherwise I feel I can follow anyone and then unfollow if I find I don't want them on my timeline. I spend very little time vetting, perhaps reading 2 or 3 posts. And even that is likely only for low follower accounts.
Oct 16, 2026, 4:27 AM@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
Oct 16, 2026, 4:28 AM@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
Oct 16, 2026, 4:48 AM@altlazybear I voted no to both. Some of my favorite people on here intentionally keep a low profile, some are very popular, all are wonderful people. Having a lot of followers changes the what the experience is like (for better and for worse), but I think that's more useful to know for keeping in mind that everyone has a different experience of fedi.
Oct 16, 2026, 4:52 AM@altlazybear I find a better indicator of a person's character is to flip on "show replies" when looking through their posts and see what kinds of conversations they have with people.
@aeva I'm thinking once someone reaches a certain notoriety, every action they do is inspected in great detail.
I don't think I can live like that, especially now that people on or off the internet are on edge these days, (but much less irl)
@altlazybear only in as much as I think considerably less of people with a high follower count who pivot to posting engagement bait.
@altlazybear I answered yes on #WW2 if someone has a follower count over a thousand or fifteen hundred or so, I trust them *less*. And I don't follow back if they follow me.
Oct 16, 2026, 11:49 PM@altlazybear I generally don't follow people-accounts with more than a hundred followers, I am here mostly for human connection and a few news/bot accounts. I used to have lots of parasocial connections and while it's a bit rewarding, I don't think it's healthy for me.
Oct 17, 2026, 3:34 AM@altlazybear The only thing I, personally, find the follower count useful for is, if it's *zero*, that's a sign that the account may be a spambot. Not conclusive by itself, but enough to warrant closer investigation.
