The issue is, it's the same data. If you know when someone follows you, you can add them to the list, and get a count. Follows, however, may be showing up on relays YOU don't follow. Depending on the person doing the following, they may even use multiple clients with different relay setups. At the end of the day, the relays don't talk to each other. So you only see what you request. It would be possible to just have a client passively checking the relays it does follow to have an incomplete set of alerts when someone follows you, but it'd just be one more thing that doesn't work the way people expect it to based on the centralized experience.

I'm not asking for new "more accurate" information. Only the same information that is already being presented when you are *not* following the npub. This shouldn't require any back-end work, only a change to the follow-list iconography and additional labeling on the npub profile pages.