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
- Yeah, there currently seem to be a bunch of rough edges with Lemmy. Another is that iirc editing a comment increases the comment count shown on a post.
  Nothing that can't be fixed though, and it's encouraging how good Lemmy feels already compared to reddit (for me at least).
  
  Another such rough edge is that comments sometimes get posted twice, like your comment
- Yeah, there currently seem to be a bunch of rough edges with Lemmy. Another is that iirc editing a comment increases the comment count shown on a post.
  Nothing that can't be fixed though, and it's encouraging how good Lemmy feels already compared to reddit (for me at least).
- At a bare minimum it should be called 'local subscribers' to make that clear if there are technical reasons making a total number difficult

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.
- I'd be happy to see it divided by total users in an instance; 21.7% of the users on bands.music are subscribed to Beatles, 1.3% are subscribed to Soundgarden, so on.

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.
- Imagine the guys developing Lemmy. For years this was a fun hobby project and all of a sudden Reddit decides to implode giving you magnitudes more users and servers requesting changes.
  
  Eh, I think discussing potential improvement ideas isn't harmful, as long as it's done respectfully. IMO, that's how you figure out the best improvements, with people sharing different perspectives/opinions/etc. Most of the discussion I've seen about Lemmy so far has been like that, not demanding changes or being rude to the developers (in fact, most of the sentiment I've seen towards the developers/hosts of instances has been super positive, which is great). I don't think that folks entering the community should feel unwelcome to voice their opinions, even if others might disagree or those in charge don't choose to make those changes in the end. But seeing folks talking about these things and seeing the number of people in support or against something might help someone in charge realize that maybe some change or update would actually be really beneficial to their site, and end up helping them make something their even more proud of. Although, I can imagine a huge influx of people to any site like this, along with the sudden boom in corresponding discussions, is pretty crazy to deal with if you're the creator(s) of said site.
  
  It also comes with contributors, too. Obviously there has been a huge rush of demand but the development team went from 2 to I think 5 or 6 now.
- Yes, I also hope Lemmy becomes more user friendly. I think it is okay-ish by now. Some things are great, others are still a little terrible.
  Mostly, I want to point at ongoing development and encourage anyone who can to support it. You can even post bounties on specific issues to encourage developers to work on that.
- It'll only get better from here at least. There are good suggestions floating around that, if implemented, will make Lemmy a lot easier to use as a platform. Having an easier on-boarding experience like Mastodon will go a long way, and people have suggested being able to merge communities by having them mirror each-other which would be great.
  But I think people need to let go of the idea that Lemmy should cater to the average person or be bigger than Reddit. The Fediverse isn't a replacement for social media, it's an alternative. We don't need 100 million active users. I'm pretty happy at where we are now, and hope that the community will grow over time to maybe get to one million.
- Yeah, the way instances are not that well aware of other instances is a big barrier. In particular, it's extra difficult to be the first in your instance to subscribe to a community. And the "all" feed in small instances sucks because it only includes what people on your instance have subscribed to.
  
  Ah. This explains why my All feed got really weird really fast.
- I actually think some technological hurdle is a good thing. If it's a little difficult to join, that will act as its own filter to keep the laziest and lowest effort people away.

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 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.
- Instance-agnostic links to posts would be good too.

Are there plans to display the actual numer or is it just not possible becaus of the underlying protocol?
- It's definitely possible at least, some solutions are suggested in this github issue

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'm not convinced it's a federation issue, it seems more like it's by design. After all, it does show you the active user counts. Presumably you could get the total subscribers count just by having an API call to the home community to ask for it.
  
  I'm going to share a sentence my father blew my mind with when I was 16:
  "Unreliability is the internet's biggest, best feature."
  By this, he meant that the internet is extremely fail tolerant; one server, one site, one component goes down, the rest of it keeps working.
  I think that's at play here. An instance can keep up with its own local members and subscribers, I imagine that's just a database operation, MySQL or something. But when trying to total up total number of subscribers from other instances, very realistic problems start to pop up.
  A member from Instance A subscribes to a community on Instance B. How does Instance B keep up with that subscription? A sends B a message that someone has subscribed, so it adds an entry to a "foreign subscribers" list? Cool. And I suppose an "unsubscribe" message would also be sent to remove that entry, right?
  What if that user deletes their account or it's banned? What if Instance A just...shuts down one day and never boots back up? You'll end up with these ghost entries inflating numbers. It's not an easy problem to work around.
  
  I imagine the simplest solution would be to add up the subscriber count of each instance you're federated with and show a 'federated subscribers' count per community.
- I actually like the idea of a server that polls all the instances on some reasonable frequency (could even be just once a day), and then holds information about users and communities in aggregate. That way, all the instances could just go to that one place to see totals like this without each instance having to poll every other instance.
  
  That seems to add a single point of failure for some key functionality. And who owns that server? Can they be bought out by Meta pretending to be a good citizen?

Ahhhh that makes so much sense. I was wondering why some communities with a large number of active users only had like 3 subscribers.
- For upvotes it only shows upvotes from the instances your home instance is federated with, so for a smaller instance there's a chance it has not the same big federation list as some more popular instances and thus show smaller upvote count.
  
  Upvotes should propagate across instances. With the current state of everything, not the least of which being congested servers across the ‘verse, it’s a bit of a crapshoot right now.

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?

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

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?
- comments and upvotes work similarly in the fact that only users from federated instances will show up.
  But also yes there is a short delay before comments sync in general too aside from the above fact.
  
  Really bends the idea of a comment "having" so many likes or whatever.
  Reminds me of a talk Tom Scott gave once about being able to ban people in real life. He imagined an implant which distorted your perception and would just photoshop out someone in real time, you wouldn't hear them, you wouldn't see them, you would subconsciously step around them without noticing. Something entirely different could be taking place around you and you'd never know.

Are the mods of those communities able to see the total amount of people subscribed from every instance, though?
- Being a mod doesn't change anything. If the community is from your instance it will be accurate. If not, in the sidebar under the name of the community there is a link to visit the community on the site of the home instance. You can click that to see the community on it's home site amd that will show the accurate count.
  Subscriber count isn't really that helpful though, better to look at the active user coints, which seem to be mostly accurate regardless of which instance you are viewing from.
  
  Oh, that's a shame :(
  I would've recommended mods announcing the amount of their subscribers in milestones. But at least it's more accurate in measuring the amount of active users who actually engage in the community!
- I’m a mod of a tiny community and I can’t work out how to view my subscribers. I’m on the lemmy.world instance though and nothing seems to be working like it should today.

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
- Automatically distributing users across instances fails to treat them as independently operate websites. That's not going to fly.
  Viewing everything through a user lens, and ignoring that site operators may have site specific goals is, uh, not ok.
  
  It can be done still keeping independent instances, by just distributing data and load across instances connected to the network, depending on their available resources, instead of explicitly creating new duplicated users on each instance.
  It however require a lot of work and effort. I don't know if anyone will ever manage to implement it.

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.
- Yes. I'm on a small instance and some communities have 3-4 subscribers. Those are the big ones lmao
- Yeah, just added a bunch of comms and it often showed 0 subscribers while I know from lemmyexplorer there's way more.
- For me on my small instance, this YSK community shows 30ish subscribers but 2000 active users per month.

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

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.
- I'd say that's pretty much it—querying the database locally for subscriber counts was probably a very simple feature to add, at least versus collating totals from other instances (perhaps would need more data sending over activitypub to facilitate it)
  That and it helps pick communities to subscribe to, so there's value enough in the local count to be able to determine at a glance which communities are active, without having to go into each one.
- Not sure how lemmy implements this, but I suppose it's not a trivial task in such decentralized environment. Imagine 10 users from instance A subscribed to instance B and then instance A went permanently down. If B holds number of subscription requests it's out of date. If B has to poll every instance it's federated with it's additional arguably unnecessary load. So yeah local subscriptions are a low hanging fruit
- I want to preface this by saying that I really don't know anything about Lemmy, but I can see where subscriptions are managed by the subscribers servers in a federated situation: the community's server might not even know who is subscribed to it since the subscribers server might be responsible for pulling data.
  But any individual subscribers server would know about other users on that server that are subscribed to that community
- Main reason for showing accurate user counts across instances is to give an idea of how active the communities are at a glance.
  People will probably think twice about joining a community with low numbers, and it normally also causes those communities to be harder to find in the first place.

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

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.

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 😅

Good to know

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 :)
- Oops my bad, I'll update the post

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.

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

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.

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