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?
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.