If that's how you define "real" followers then you might as well use an IM application instead. IMO the whole point of (Twitter style) social media is having ef

If that's how you define "real" followers then you might as well use an IM application instead. IMO the whole point of (Twitter style) social media is having effortless reach and interactions without explicitly sending stuff to anybody. I had over 10 thousand and had many interactions with people but wouldn't feel like bothering them on other platforms (unless it was of the same nature). And the few people who bothered to contact me personally felt a little awkward too. I don't necessarily want to be talking to these people directly. The magic is you just publish whatever you want and people can look at it. They can comment but there's no obligation to respond. Having actual conversations with that many people would be a huge chore. The whole thing isn't about having relationships with people at all but about spreading information. It could be about yourself in which case there would be some implicit one way relationship but that's just one use case.