diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 3dadf3a..fbaeec4 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -112,13 +112,23 @@ substandard shows a badge when the site you're visiting has a standard.site publ
   link card from the page's own Open Graph tags, which is why the text is a
   title and a URL rather than a record embed — see `src/lib/share.ts`.
 - How long a read keeps depends on whose data it is (`src/lib/cache.ts`).
-  Your own repo — subscriptions, follows, blocks, labeler subscriptions —
-  keeps for an hour and is dropped the moment this extension writes to it,
-  so subscribing never leaves the popup insisting you have not. Anything
-  about somebody else's publication, profile or labels keeps for a day,
-  since nothing you do changes it. Both live in session storage, which the
-  browser clears when it closes: nothing about which publications you
+  Your own repo, where this extension also writes — subscriptions, blocks,
+  labeler subscriptions — keeps for an hour and is dropped the moment it
+  writes, so subscribing never leaves the popup insisting you have not.
+  Anything about somebody else's publication, profile or labels keeps for a
+  day, since nothing you do changes it. Both live in session storage, which
+  the browser clears when it closes: nothing about which publications you
   visited is written to disk.
+- Your follow list is the exception, and keeps for a day on disk. Nothing
+  here creates or deletes a follow, so a stale set cannot hide something you
+  did; and reading it is one request per hundred follows against your own
+  PDS, which is five hundred requests for an account following fifty
+  thousand people. That is not a walk to repeat every time the browser
+  restarts. It is the one value allowed on disk because of what it is not: a
+  follow list is your own public social graph, and unlike the rest it records
+  nothing about where you have been. The walk runs in the background worker,
+  starting when you sign in, so no popup ever waits on it — the subscriber
+  count draws first and the faces appear when it lands.
 - The refresh icon next to the Open button re-fetches everything, since
   records can change remotely. Refresh bypasses every cache in the path,
   including the well-known probes — a publisher correcting their site sees
diff --git a/TODO.md b/TODO.md
index 1b42f72..9277374 100644
--- a/TODO.md
+++ b/TODO.md
@@ -237,17 +237,25 @@ intersecting two lists, and both are capped:
   says so in its tooltip.
 - The follow set comes from `listRecords`, which stops at 2000 records. An
   account following more than that silently loses the tail, and unlike the
-  scan cap nothing reports it beyond the count `src/popup/cards/follows.ts`
-  logs.
+  scan cap nothing reports it beyond the count `src/background.ts` logs.
 
 The first cap binds on a publication and has not bound on any measured so far
 (the largest had 53 subscribers). The second binds on the *reader*, and now
 costs more than a face: the owner card's "Following" line reads the same set,
 so a reader with more than 2000 follows can be told they do not follow an
-account they followed early. Both are worth revisiting together, and the fix
-for the second is probably to ask Constellation — or the reader's own repo, by
-rkey — about the one account in question rather than to hold the whole follow
-set in the popup.
+account they followed early.
+
+Raising the second is cheaper than it was. The walk runs in the background
+worker and is cached for a day on disk (`graph` in `src/lib/cache.ts`), so its
+cost is once-a-day and off every render path; 2000 is a number inherited from
+when the popup did this inline, and the question is now how many requests a
+reader's own PDS should take once a day (a 50,000-follow account is 500) rather
+than how long a popup may hang.
+
+The alternative is to stop holding the whole set and ask about the one account
+in question — Constellation, or the reader's own repo by rkey. That answers the
+owner card directly; the subscriber row would need the reverse question, which
+of a publication's subscribers the reader follows.
 
 ## Let the user manage their labelers