YSK: Subscriber count on communities only show the numbers of users subscribed from your specific instance. The real number might be much larger than you think.
Edit: Why YSK: New users of Lemmy can find the number low and think that a community is dead or inactive, when infact it might be a thriving place with a lot of activity.
This is a huge thing I didn't know about. Lemmy really needs to show the full number. I'm on .world and even here everything seems really niche and small. It hurts perception hugely
I haven't looked into Lemmy/fediverse philosophy so I don't know how viable it is, but I'd love to see some variant of "X subscribers total on known servers (y from local)" in the future.
Well, I don't really pay attention to and I'm sure they'll make browser extensions at some point. So not even remotely close to a priority.
For all the problems with Reddit, I can see there being so many barriers to entry on here that will keep a lot of people from ever using or switching to Lemmy. Hope this gets ironed out.
This needs to be integrated into Lemmy asap; really hurts discoverability and makes comms look way smaller than they are to new users.
This, instance migration, and assigning new users to good general instances (that arent overloaded) like lemm.ee or vlemmy.net upon registration (letting them change it of course) so they don't need to know about instances would go a long way to being user friendly.
This is an interesting problem with federation by design. I do wonder if there's some space to create a pipeline type application that shares this kind of data. Or an integration with the site you listed.
Well huh. I did not in fact know this, and was wondering why there were so few subscribers to most communities or even zero sometimes. Feels like changing this to include all subscribers would be really helpful?
Lemmy currently misses a sync feature across servers. Meaning that moving one lose all subscription and messages.
The real solutions should be a distributed network to support federation, instead than a plain federated one, i.e. an automated redistribution of users and loads across servers (lemmy instances).
I don't know how they are planning to manage it on the long run
I noticed this as well. The lemmyverse list of communities showed big numbers, but Lemmy.world would show maybe < 100. The way I saw to identify active communities (outside of your list) was to look at the posts themselves. Seeing the upvotes and comment numbers definitely let me know there were more than just my Instance being active.
Ah, I wondered if that's what it was - I found a Star Wars community through a web search and it said there were 2.5k subscribers, but it only shows 1 subscriber (me) when I view from an app.
Are you sure? I don't think so. It shows users with data on the instance. A one subscriber instance will still show hundreds or thousands depending on how much federated content there is.
I actually ran into this while setting up this account. Made me triple check I was subbing to a community that was going to have any activity (first person from my instance to search it apparently)
I think it's a good idea to sum these statistics, but not for all instances (as it will be super easy to hijack with fake instances).
Admin should manually select instances they trust and get the subscribed count summed.
Huh. I have 140-something showing as subscribed on c/cocktails and maybe 15 participating actively in a way I can see (commenting or posting) but it doesn't even exist in that lemmyverse link. Just an empty community called "cocktail" and a midwest social one.