What does following others actually do?

This might sound a bit silly of a question, but I've been playing since december and I have a pretty bad memory so I don't remember if it was explained in the tutorial lol. But as the title says, what does following other players actually do? Is it just that they show up in My World? And is there a way to know how many actual players follow me? Bc I assume the 'followers' count they give ingame is just fictionnal to visually see your progress. Knowing how Nintendo is now with online communities, there's probably no actual use behind those features but I'm asking just in case I'm missing out lol