follower
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A follower is someone who has chosen to receive updates of a profile, typically by explicitly clicking a follow button, the inverse relation is a following. followers are the list of people who have chosen to receive updates of a profile, often shown on a page by the same name, sometimes paginated. Similarly, followings is the list of profiles that someone has chosen to receive updates of.
IndieWeb Examples
hmans
- Displays followers as a list with pants marked up with
rel="follower"
([1]) since ????-??-?? - Displays followees as a list with pants marked up with
rel="following"
at [2] since ????-??-??
Ben Roberts
Ben Roberts displays contacts as a list marked up with rel="contact"
at [3]
Acegiak
Ashton McAllan uses the wordpress blogroll as a subscription list for her reader whisperfollow. Wordpress automatically includes XFN display functionality for these links.
gRegor Morrill
gRegor Morrill displays a list of sites he's following at http://gregorlove.com/following/ since 2016-04-05
- Uses only simple h-card markup, pending consumers that need something more.
Brainstorming
Display followers
Why display followers
- Displaying the people who follow you could help encourage other people to follow you.
How to display followers
When you receive webmentions for follow posts that are other people following you, keep track those webmentions in their own reverse chronological list in your site storage.
Then you can recreate your own "Followers" page, very similar to a Twitter followers page (which lists your followers by most recent first), e.g. David Shanske's https://twitter.com/dshanske/followers
Display followings
Why display followings
- Displaying the people you follow could be useful for switching between readers without having to re-add everyone
- A public list of people you follow could be sensitive; would be good to curate who is on it rather than have only all-public vs all-private options. - Amy Guy
How to display followings
Merely keeping an archive page of just your own follow posts is close enough to display a followings page, in reverse chronological order of who you followed most recently first, similar to a Twitter followings page, e.g. David Shanskeβs https://twitter.com/dshanske/following
How to remove yourself from following lists
This led to the thought of how do you βunfollowβ someone, especially if following lists are used for things like Vouch? Seems like the simplest thing would be to either delete the follow post or mark the follow post private (so that it is no longer available via webmention), and then send another webmention. This should cause the person who is being followedβs system to delete the original webmention, which means the followers list would no longer show you as a follower.
See Also
- follow
- blogrollβ―β list of blogs you follow/recommend
- http://microformats.org/wiki/xfn-brainstorming#follower_and_following
- losing followers
- Criticism: bad idea to use number of followers as any kind predictive metric: 2021-12-07 Millions of Followers? For Book Sales, βItβs Unreliable.β / Social-media fandom can help authors score book deals and bigger advances, but does it translate to how a new title will sell? Publishers are increasingly skeptical.