This is what my followers list currently looks like. I wanted to look to see who was following me, so that I could follow back, and now I have to wade through all this crap coming from public relays.

Woah crazy. I don’t even bother looking at my follower list, I figure it’s mostly just bots anyways.

Probably is. I'm thinking follow count only says anything concrete, if you only look at private/paid relays. That's my current workaround, at any rate.

Figuring out a reliable way to actually check that stat would help nostr, i know devs made a bunch of follow bots back in the day and boosted people’s numbers for the lols to demonstrate its brokenness

I guess the idea is that they could be lurkers, but lurkers usually change the profile info a bit, if they do more than look around one time. These are all identical, so single-use npubs.

I just downloaded Primal and created a new npub, selected that I was interested in Bitcoin, Finance, and Nostr, and this is my immediate follow list. FOLLOW LISTS FOR NEW NPUBS SHOULD ONLY CONTAIN THAT SAME NPUB. https://next.nostrudel.ninja/#/u/npub1kljyrm0svtj94q2fgqquy62ap76glale03v27snq6f9wvxztq3dq28hh0z/following

If I select all of the categories, this is who my new npub is following. Apparently, this isn't the only client doing the autofollowing because myself and hardly anyone I regularly interact with is listed (The list is incredibly myopic; no wonder people think we only talk about Bitcoin!), but we're being autofollowed by someone. https://next.nostrudel.ninja/#/u/npub1gq7nv4t3ucnyy0fqsxv40rrfce89ay3z34a5mv75wafsyamy7w6sjaqrjr/following

Yeah, that's fucking annoying.