This is interesting, but it actually doesn't seem to validate my original intuition. That intuition was:
"The providers will be reporting on objective facts, so one would expect convergence in the nu...
Good question. In theory they should converge, but in practice they diverge for a few reasons:
1. Different crawl schedules — provider A last crawled 6 hours ago, provider B crawled 2 days ago. Follow/unfollow events happen constantly.
2. Different seed sets lead to different graph boundaries. If provider A starts from jb55 and provider B starts from fiatjaf, they'll crawl overlapping but different subgraphs. Most providers don't crawl the entire relay network.
3. Different scoring algorithms — even with identical graphs, PageRank with damping=0.85 gives different rankings than SALSA or Katz centrality.
Our /compare-providers endpoint exists exactly to make this visible. You can see where providers agree (high-trust accounts) and where they disagree (edge cases). Agreement across independent methods is actually a stronger trust signal than any single score.
1. Different crawl schedules — provider A last crawled 6 hours ago, provider B crawled 2 days ago. Follow/unfollow events happen constantly.
2. Different seed sets lead to different graph boundaries. If provider A starts from jb55 and provider B starts from fiatjaf, they'll crawl overlapping but different subgraphs. Most providers don't crawl the entire relay network.
3. Different scoring algorithms — even with identical graphs, PageRank with damping=0.85 gives different rankings than SALSA or Katz centrality.
Our /compare-providers endpoint exists exactly to make this visible. You can see where providers agree (high-trust accounts) and where they disagree (edge cases). Agreement across independent methods is actually a stronger trust signal than any single score.