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.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/536440
You can use https://lemmyverse.net/ to check actual subscriber numbers.
We need to have both numbers shown on the lemmi UI. It's silly not to
That would require each subscribing instance to report its number of local subscribers to the instance hosting the community, which would then add up the numbers and report the total back to the subscribers. That seems like it would be easy to manipulate, where one malicious instance could misreport local subscriber numbers to change the apparent relative popularities of different communities throughout the fediverse.
It's such an obviously weird stat to use, I've been assuming there must be some technical reason why it's more complicated than we might think.
Is "how many people from your own instance subscribe" even a useful metric? I don't see what value it brings, I don't care how many people on there happen to also come from my instance, I just want to know which instance has the most active version of this community.
It is if you're looking for an established community.
What do you mean by "established" though? Is a community with 80 people from my instance and 500 more across all other instances less established than one with 250 people from my instance and 30 more across all other instances? If so, how? Legitimate question - I'm new here and it's possible there's a good reason to care, but I can't see one.
I was wondering about that. Some communities seemed WAY too active for like 40 subscribers, lol
Makes so much more sense now.
I hope this is something they can fix in the future. It's much more useful to see total subscribers overall.
Good to know.
That's good to know. I though some communities seemed larger than the numbers suggested. Would be good to get both numbers visible.
I agree with this. I find both numbers interesting, but the total number of subscribers seems more interesting than the local number.
This makes so much sense! I was trying to figure out how Lemmy.world communities were so much more active when another instance (or kbin) copy of the community/magazine seemed to have a higher subscriber count. But I’m on other Lemmy instances and Kbin so I wasn’t seeing the lemmy.world subscriber counts.
Thanks for sharing this knowledge.
Also, not all comments on posts get federated equally.
Oh? This is news to me. If you can please explain.
I'll give you two links to the same post but on two different Lemmy instances:
https://geddit.social/post/17196
and
https://beehaw.org/post/659342
It's the exact same post, with the same user who created it and everything.
But on the Geddit instance, you have several comments answering the question. On the Beehaw instance, you only see my test post (which you won't find on the geddit's version).
And truth be told, I have no idea why there's a difference there. Both servers are federated with eachother:
https://beehaw.org/instances and https://geddit.social/instances
And yet, there's a difference.
edit
One thing I could think off is that maybe it's not federating because there are no subscribers there. I'll try that next.
I'm seeing "X users/ month" so its showing number of active users VS total users?
I think lemmyverse doesn't count kbin users btw
Defo good to know! Hadn’t realised that