One feature request that developers often ask for is a way to tell which clients are listening for messages on a channel.
For example, a chat application needs to know what users are in each chat room at any given point in time.
Or, to take a more complex example, say you have a distributed logging setup where log data is generated by various clients and sent to multiple servers (some store the data long-term, others parse the data in real time and send alerts if necessary, etc).
Since log data is important, we would like to know which servers are currently listening for data. Furthermore, we should be notified when servers come online or go offline.