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.

  • jose1324@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

    • qwop@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      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).

    • derelict@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      At a bare minimum it should be called ‘local subscribers’ to make that clear if there are technical reasons making a total number difficult

    • qwop@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      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).

  • Zikeji@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Frogge@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    For all the problems with Reddit, I can see there being so many barriers to entry on here that will keep a lot of people from ever using or switching to Lemmy. Hope this gets ironed out.

    • Omgarm@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Imagine the guys developing Lemmy. For years this was a fun hobby project and all of a sudden Reddit decides to implode giving you magnitudes more users and servers requesting changes.

      • Rannoch@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Eh, I think discussing potential improvement ideas isn’t harmful, as long as it’s done respectfully. IMO, that’s how you figure out the best improvements, with people sharing different perspectives/opinions/etc. Most of the discussion I’ve seen about Lemmy so far has been like that, not demanding changes or being rude to the developers (in fact, most of the sentiment I’ve seen towards the developers/hosts of instances has been super positive, which is great). I don’t think that folks entering the community should feel unwelcome to voice their opinions, even if others might disagree or those in charge don’t choose to make those changes in the end. But seeing folks talking about these things and seeing the number of people in support or against something might help someone in charge realize that maybe some change or update would actually be really beneficial to their site, and end up helping them make something their even more proud of. Although, I can imagine a huge influx of people to any site like this, along with the sudden boom in corresponding discussions, is pretty crazy to deal with if you’re the creator(s) of said site.

      • Undearius@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        It also comes with contributors, too. Obviously there has been a huge rush of demand but the development team went from 2 to I think 5 or 6 now.

    • Spzi@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Yes, I also hope Lemmy becomes more user friendly. I think it is okay-ish by now. Some things are great, others are still a little terrible.

      Mostly, I want to point at ongoing development and encourage anyone who can to support it. You can even post bounties on specific issues to encourage developers to work on that.

    • simple@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’ll only get better from here at least. There are good suggestions floating around that, if implemented, will make Lemmy a lot easier to use as a platform. Having an easier on-boarding experience like Mastodon will go a long way, and people have suggested being able to merge communities by having them mirror each-other which would be great.

      But I think people need to let go of the idea that Lemmy should cater to the average person or be bigger than Reddit. The Fediverse isn’t a replacement for social media, it’s an alternative. We don’t need 100 million active users. I’m pretty happy at where we are now, and hope that the community will grow over time to maybe get to one million.

    • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, the way instances are not that well aware of other instances is a big barrier. In particular, it’s extra difficult to be the first in your instance to subscribe to a community. And the “all” feed in small instances sucks because it only includes what people on your instance have subscribed to.

    • fishos@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I actually think some technological hurdle is a good thing. If it’s a little difficult to join, that will act as its own filter to keep the laziest and lowest effort people away.

  • Altair@vlemmy.net
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • ShunkW@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Dave@lemmy.nz
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Dave@lemmy.nz
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • Mrrt@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Dave@lemmy.nz
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • NorwegianBlues@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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?

        • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • zinklog@lemmy.fmhy.mlOP
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • Muddybulldog@mylemmy.win
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • Rannoch@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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?

  • Hikiru@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’ve posted a feature request on the Lemmy GitHub to fix this, I hope they do something

  • supermurs@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    This was good information, I was wondering about the low number in some communities but now I know why.

  • mintiefresh@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Thank you for posting this. I had no idea and always wondered why the numbers were so different between my accounts.

  • henfredemars@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Holodeck_Moriarty@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • zinklog@lemmy.fmhy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • XiELEd@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Are the mods of those communities able to see the total amount of people subscribed from every instance, though?

    • Dave@lemmy.nz
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      1 year ago

      Being a mod doesn’t change anything. If the community is from your instance it will be accurate. If not, in the sidebar under the name of the community there is a link to visit the community on the site of the home instance. You can click that to see the community on it’s home site amd that will show the accurate count.

      Subscriber count isn’t really that helpful though, better to look at the active user coints, which seem to be mostly accurate regardless of which instance you are viewing from.

      • XiELEd@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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        Oh, that’s a shame :(

        I would’ve recommended mods announcing the amount of their subscribers in milestones. But at least it’s more accurate in measuring the amount of active users who actually engage in the community!

    • SomeoneElse@lemmy.world
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      I’m a mod of a tiny community and I can’t work out how to view my subscribers. I’m on the lemmy.world instance though and nothing seems to be working like it should today.