Just realized my fediverse is a lot smaller than everyone else's. Is this intentional or a bug? - eviltoast

There are a lot of communities I haven’t subscribed to since there were only 1-2 other users. I’ve also noticed that some communities started out strong and seemed to practically die.

But today I was looking for a community and searched through lemmy.world instead of my own instance. Turns out the subscribers never left - I just can’t see them. For example:

  • if I search !dccomics@lemmy.ml using my home instance on liftoff, I see 2 subscribers
  • if I look up the same community using lemmy.world, I see 58 subscribers
  • if I look up the community in Google (not logged in), I see 58 subscribers
  • if I click on the !dccomics@lemmy.ml link in my own post, I see 110 subscribers
  • if I search using my home instance for new communities, say !curatedtumblr@sh.itjust.works , there’s 1 subscriber and no posts
  • if I access !curatedtumblr@sh.itjust.works through my saved committees list, I can see posts

I’ve noticed the same issues on !lemmy.world and !sh.itjust.works , but I can only say that for sure because I know those instances should have more traffic. I don’t think my instance has defederated with theirs.

Does anyone know of this is an issue with liftoff, lemmy, or simple defederation?

      • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        1 year ago

        Is there any way to see the true subscriber count of a community while logged in?

        1. Browse lemmyverse.net instead of your instance’s community browser. The former will show apples to apples activity stats across instances.
        2. When looking at a remote community from your Instance browser, visit the community on its home instance to see the global subscriber count.
        3. Go on GitHub and emoji react to https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3464 to show your support for this feature, or try to actually fix it. I don’t see core devs working on much other than performance and moderation tools for a while, as these are both existential gaps given current growth rates. Quality of life features like community discovery (which are extremely important to users) are likely to take a back seat to these.
      • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        Idk if it’s in Liftoff, but on the web you click the !communityname link on the top, that redirects you to the community’s home instance with full sub count.

        • johntashEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Is the sub count on the home instance only for that instance or does it actually aggregate counts from all remote instances too?

  • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Generally you only see posts after the point someone from your instance searched for that community. If you’re the only one on your instance, well that’s you.

    It’s general Lemmy behaviour.

  • palitu@lemmy.perthchat.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    As above. It confused me too. That said, I tend to search on some of the aggregator websites for new comms. But finding them is hard, especially when you are on a smaller instance.