ALERT: I'm noticing trolls are making carbon copies of my account with my same image, header, and bio, then trying to get people to sign up for their listserv of sorts.
Mastodon doesn't have an official verification system yet so this is a problem. Please do me a favor and report/block anyone you see mimicking my page.
This is my only account on Mastodon. It has 40K+ followers (and growing). If you see an account mimicking mine w/low followers, you can bet its a fraud.
@QasimRashid Follower count is also not reliable:
a) the instance can lie about follower counts of its own users however much it wishes (and also lie about the list of followers -- you can only sometimes verify that with the other side),
b) you can create an instance with 10k sock puppet accounts on it and have them all actually follow someone; if you are too blatant about it many instances will likely defederate from that instance, but (a) you can be subtler (b) it takes some time.
For these reasons, follower count on ActivityPub (and, I think, ~any decentralized social network) cannot be meaningful. What would be more meaningful is something like "how many of people I follow follow that account", but we don't have tools to show that ATM.
