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.