The project: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon
Mastodon instance affiliated with Lemmy.World: https://mastodon.world
Discuss the Mastodon platform here. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
This is one from many examples.
I understand that this bot account mirrors the tweets into Mastodon, but how is it normal that it also mirrors the number of followers? Is it a bug?
If you check their followers list, they have a few hundreds at most.
It's meant to be a full mirror/clone of the Twitter account so it displays how many followers it has on Twitter.
try sharing the post, it'll share a twitter link, it's supposed to be a very light and direct mirror
Not a bug. Also not a feature. Somewhere in between.
It's just a number in a database. If you are the server admin, there's no reason why you couldn't fiddle with it. When anyone asks for the profile, server sends what's in the database. They're doing the same thing with the Joined Date.
If it wasn't a bot specifically mirroring another platform's stuff, that kind of manipulative behavior might rub other server admins the wrong way.
Thank you for the explanation! It seems logical now, considering they host the server.