I understand the reason for not making the number of people following in public. I’m fine with that. It’s not supposed to be a competition.
However, there are many technical reasons to know the number of people following us. For example, I recently migrated my followers from Mastodon to Mb, but I am not sure if the process worked. I have no idea if everyone was migrated. And people migrating from Mb to Mastodon would face the same problem.
I suggest adding the number of followers we have somewhere in the “Account” page. Maybe under the ActivityPub item.
This is a really good point. Account migration can be quite confusing, and it would be nice if there was an easy way to tell at a glance if everything worked, especially since it can take a while.
In the meantime, if you know your previous follower count on Mastodon and want to email help, I can do a quick sanity check for whether it appears the followers migrated. There might be some inconsistencies just if Mastodon servers are no longer online, etc.
In my opinion, what makes information such as followers toxic is the fact that it is public. If it is only visible to the account owner, there’s no harm because there is nothing to compare it to. And in some situations, it can be very useful.
In addition to the post above, there were many times the list of people following me on Mastodon was useful (or Twitter in the past). I went there to look at the avatars and handles, trying to remember the name of a person I had forgotten but who I needed to contact to ask something.