You can use https://lemmyverse.net/ to check actual subscriber numbers.
Edit: Why YSK: New users of Lemmy can find the number low and think that a community is dead or inactive, when infact it might be a thriving place with a lot of activity.
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.
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 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.
The instance that the community is on has the total list, and since the active user count is accurate I presume it’s already sending that information in some way. Easiest would be to include it with that data, I’d think.
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.
At a high level you’ve pretty much nailed what is happening.
What if that user deletes their account or it’s banned?
Lemmy federates these to let other instances know. Check the mod log (link at bottom of every lemmy instance website) to see the record of this).
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
This is already an issue, but a solvable one. Currently some instances are blocking hundreds of other instances that used to exist but no longer do, because Lemmy keeps trying to contact them and when it fails it retries.
But the solution probably isn’t that hard. Someone smarter than me can work it out but I imagine it working something like retry every 5 mins for an hour, every hour for a week, then don’t retry unyil you get a new request from that instance (e.g. for one of their users to subscribe to a community on your instance).
In fact, Mastodon is a lot more mature than Lemmy an I expect would have the same problem, so we can probably copy whatever their solution is.
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?
I wouldn’t call that functionally “key” - in fact we’re doing okay without it now. It would be an easy way to add some nice to have functionally without a lot of overhead.
Ahhhh that makes so much sense. I was wondering why some communities with a large number of active users only had like 3 subscribers.
i sometimes wonder if it works the same for upvotes?
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.
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.
ah so that’s why I’ve been seeing conflicting upvote counts. Thats good to know thanks!
What? It’s your post? The fediverse is so small lol.
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.
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.
For me on my small instance, this YSK community shows 30ish subscribers but 2000 active users per month.
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.
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.
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.
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
Good to know
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
At a bare minimum it should be called ‘local subscribers’ to make that clear if there are technical reasons making a total number difficult
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).
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
A similar thing actually happens on Reddit. You can click the send button more than once if you’re quick enough. I saw it all the time.
I’ve only experienced this while using apps
Haha, got a “network error” on my first attempt so clicked send again, I guess it did go through the first time after all :D
Typical Lemmy experience, haha.
Honestly has its charms, gives me the feeling of nostalgia, like we’re back in the early 2000’s.
Whazzuuuppp.
AND MY AXE!
Same thing happened to me on reddit official android app many times.
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?
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.
Thank you for posting this. I had no idea and always wondered why the numbers were so different between my accounts.
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.
Sounds straight from a black mirror episode.
Hmm the number I see on that page is lower than the number it shows me in the lemmy UI
feelsbadman?
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.
