Kinda strange when people complain about something that's easily explainable and understandable...😳
How can an instance count followers and following from instances it doesn't know about or instances they block? They can't...soooo.....stop complaining? Cause I don't see how it could be done reasonably.
It's like you not knowing every single person in the world. It's not feasible, so stop worrying about it so much....
@BeAware I think you misunderstand the problem. The ActivityPub specification encourages implementations to expose a followers/following collections on actors. Those collections have a TotalItems property in them which should allow anyone to see the count.
@BeAware federating between instances should have nothing to do with it.
Dan is presenting a feature where a user views another profile and then they can see mutuals. This can be done if Mastodon would load all the information (including follower list) about the profile when you view it from your own instance, instead of relying only on data that has been previously federated.
It's a trivial feature that Mastodon is lacking, and I feel like that's what the toot you quoted complains about.
@BeAware I don't know to be honest, it's possible that other clients don't take advantage of the information. But as the owner of a mastodon account, that's the one that annoys me the most. :D