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.

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.

Are there plans to display the actual numer or is it just not possible becaus of the underlying protocol?

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.

I’ve posted a feature request on the Lemmy GitHub to fix this, I hope they do something

Ahhhh that makes so much sense. I was wondering why some communities with a large number of active users only had like 3 subscribers.

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?

This was good information, I was wondering about the low number in some communities but now I know why.

Thank you for posting this. I had no idea and always wondered why the numbers were so different between my accounts.

Yep, it's a bit annoying but it is what it is.

This sounds like a bug to me. At a minimum, it should be renamed to local subscribers rather than imply that it's the total count.

Are comments affected similarly? If I open this post from different accounts on different instances, the number of comments changes.

Or is that a sync problem?

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

Are the mods of those communities able to see the total amount of people subscribed from every instance, though?

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.

What's the reason to show local counts anyways? Is there more to it than a "because we can, and it was easy to implement"?

I'm curious if there are any reasons which I don't see, and doubtful they outweigh the caused unclarity.

Most people only care about total numbers, I suppose.

This had me confused for a while and I eventually decided it had to be this. Glad to have it confirmed!!

D'oh, my Lemmy Explorer count is three lower than my sh.itjust.works count. 😔

Hello there, and welcome to our community! I hope you like it in here.

Could you please include some body text as to why should people know this, and how would that help them? It’s our second rule. Thank you :)

Hmm the number I see on that page is lower than the number it shows me in the lemmy UI

feelsbadman?

tfw kbin communities aren't listed. rip.

Good to know

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)

New to Lemmy. I also found the stats confusing. I expected to see global community stats and for them to be synced between instances.

The current situation makes people think that Lemmy is basically empty 😅

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.

In fact, the subscriber count on c/Games is on lemmy.world itself 8.67K and on lemmyverse.net 7.9K. What gives?

Somehow decentralisation is bad and we need centralisation to make a thriving ecosystem