The total field can also be used to represent more information than just the follower count:
- When providing only ‘from_id’, ‘total’ represents the number of users a user is following.
- When providing only ‘to_id’, ‘total’ represents the total number of followers the user has.
- When providing both ‘from_id’ and ‘to_id’, ‘total’ is either ‘1’ or ‘0’ depending if ‘from_id’ is following ‘to_id’.
Pretty useful.