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 Shanske’s https://twitter.com/dshanske/following

How to remove yourself from following lists

This led to the thought of how do you “unfollow” 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 followed’s system to delete the original webmention, which means the followers list would no longer show you as a follower.

See Also

• follow
• blogroll – 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, ‘It’s Unreliable.’ / 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.