[Request]: In notifications and post statistics, show the number of followers a boosting person has about tuba HOT 2 OPEN

I can see two conflicting sides to this already :/ (for the same reasons as the post interaction buttons stats). Some people left traditional social media to escape the constant "ranking" of interactions based on popularity etc and some other people (and businesses) needing them to see what kind of content is more popular etc.

I don't think there should be an option just for this either. Maybe as a tooltip on hover?

Coincidentally, I played with popovers today (#495) which might be the best middle ground solution for this. What do you think?

Sort the users there by number of followers

Not possible. Like most things on the API, there's pagination and no sorting options. So it can end up looking like this:

500 followers
10 followers
0 followers
--- scrolled down enough to fetch the next page ---
1000 followers
5 followers
1 follower

Show a clear visual of each users' number of followers (ex: with some encircled "colored rounded pill"-style label on that list widget, instead of the user's join date on the top-right of each person listed).

I think mastodon does it somewhat right, though we do show the user's description too 🤔

There could also be an additional "summary" part to that statistics view, showing a summary label

1. Just like the other one, pagination kills this. If there's a post with 400 boosts, Tuba would need to do 5 separate requests just to get the full list of users (and they take some time at 80 entries per request)
2. 99% of the time there will be some overlap so the number will be inaccurate (if two people have the exact same 4 followers and they both boost your post, only 4 people will see it not 8 (otherwise, getting all their followers would fall under the previous argument, they are paginated too))

I really don't think Mastodon (and especially the API) was made with this use case in mind at all :/ I'd rather see an API endpoint for "analytics" that are calculated server-side than a server-spammy inaccurate client-side attempt at it. (<-- This is not about showing the amount of followers someone has, but about the 'X users shared with Y users' request)

from tuba.

OK so sorting and "summarized statistics" are technically impossible... I guess this is why we can't have extra-nice things™ ;) but the rest of the ideas would already be a good improvement.

• I agree Mastodon's presentation in the screenshot above is nicer than what we currently have for the "Favorited by" and "Boosted by" lists, because when you have more than 4-5 items in there those lists benefit from being much more compact, instead of showing the full bio and unrelated dates; the full bio could be shown on hover maybe (perhaps with your popover idea). And in the compact view, you could show whether or not that person follows your account. Even if not sorted by followers count, this would already help a little to be able to scroll up/down the list and get a "glance" of the repartition of the propagation.
• I still think the followers count in the notification strings would be really neat to have for the real-time aspect of this (instead of needing to go dig into the stats view, and then those things don't auto-refresh, and you are "stuck" sitting around in that view instead of being able to monitor notifications for multiple things at once...)

I think the theoretical concern that "providing numbers ruins the game for some people" is overblown. If some users don't care about numbers indicating the repartition of the reach of their post comes from, then they can just visually ignore that part of the notification... and if a tiny minority of users actively wants to avoid numbers because they don't want to feel any "excitement" about their posts being appreciated, I would say that anything—numbers or not—would overwhelm them, and that I'd expect they will probably just turn off notifications entirely anyway 🤷

from tuba.