Because Nostr has no "follower" event, I figure out who follows you by asking many relays for everyone whose contact list (kind:3) includes your key. That's a rough, incomplete "sweep" that just produces candidates. That sweep is compared to a saved baseline of your known followers: anyone newly appearing is a possible new follower, anyone missing is a possible unfollow.
But a relay being down can make people falsely appear or vanish, so it never trusts the sweep, instead it goes to each candidate's own write relays, fetches their latest contact list, and checks 3 times whether your key is really in it. Only a unanimous, confirmed answer counts. On top of that, it ignores anyone whose contact list was last published a long time ago (you can set that time period in the settings), because that means they've actually followed you for ages and the sweep simply discovered them late. So that's not "new". Whatever survives all of this is shown as a real new follower (or unfollow). Everything uncertain is quietly kept as-is so you never get a false alert.
This all happens in the background every 3 hours + 3 minutes after app start and may take a few minutes to complete.
alp
npub175…9g6w0
2026-06-10 05:00:47 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…yydm
Author Public Key
npub175nul9cvufswwsnpy99lvyhg7ad9nkccxhkhusznxfkr7e0zxthql9g6w0Published at
2026-06-10 05:00:47 UTCEvent JSON
{
"id": "1f31ef43762d44a68d98148b9ef4c248615382becdb8ef740255f8daf40b1da0",
"pubkey": "f527cf970ce260e74261214bf612e8f75a59db1835ed7e4053326c3f65e232ee",
"created_at": 1781067647,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"e",
"57dca33208f72dc9368c60cf7f8126504130ec1d499960fd0758d90405ce172d",
"",
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""
],
[
"e",
"91796a20d8e276a06957ea7496fd23b8a6d3190e87acc1e871fdc695d8866d59",
"wss://noornode.nostr1.com/",
"reply",
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],
[
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],
[
"client",
"NoorNote"
]
],
"content": "Because Nostr has no \"follower\" event, I figure out who follows you by asking many relays for everyone whose contact list (kind:3) includes your key. That's a rough, incomplete \"sweep\" that just produces candidates. That sweep is compared to a saved baseline of your known followers: anyone newly appearing is a possible new follower, anyone missing is a possible unfollow.\n\nBut a relay being down can make people falsely appear or vanish, so it never trusts the sweep, instead it goes to each candidate's own write relays, fetches their latest contact list, and checks 3 times whether your key is really in it. Only a unanimous, confirmed answer counts. On top of that, it ignores anyone whose contact list was last published a long time ago (you can set that time period in the settings), because that means they've actually followed you for ages and the sweep simply discovered them late. So that's not \"new\". Whatever survives all of this is shown as a real new follower (or unfollow). Everything uncertain is quietly kept as-is so you never get a false alert.\n\nThis all happens in the background every 3 hours + 3 minutes after app start and may take a few minutes to complete.",
"sig": "0a265dbf0e03da53c2d2179bf79b752e1131d77a5eccf86e04e187d9e9b0bbb02ca893b98955b16fff42c839ea88dffb32bf3cedb82ac7b8d9c0d2e8eaf2b36c"
}