Sam on Nostr: I imagine those are the people who have internalized the Social Network model -- your ...

I imagine those are the people who have internalized the Social Network model -- your followers represent your friends (to one parasocial degree or another, at least) and so who you surround yourself with says a lot about you. That's never made sense to me, I definitely interact with these sorts of software under the Feed model -- a follow is just slightly more polite RSS pull, since you introduce yourself before running off with the content (the most they might do is take a look at your feed in turn in case they find it interesting as well).

Though I guess a legitimate case for safety is if someone does a lot of posting on followers-only, in which case by accepting a follow they're including you into a more private circle. The problem there is that ActivityPub really doesn't work well on that model. From what I remember of the specs, it could very smoothly handle group visibility, but since the protocol requires software to push notifications rather than just having it up for others to pull (i.e. RSS), having followers be the only group someone can address separately breaks a number of assumptions the designers made.