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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by zinklog@lemmy.fmhy.ml to c/youshouldknow@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] jose1324@lemmy.world 50 points 2 years 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 15 points 2 years 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).

[-] lazyvar@programming.dev 7 points 2 years ago

Another such rough edge is that comments sometimes get posted twice, like your comment Screenshot of two of the same comments showing up in the threadt

[-] qwop@programming.dev 9 points 2 years ago

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

[-] odium@programming.dev 7 points 2 years ago

Same thing happened to me on reddit official android app many times.

[-] lazyvar@programming.dev 5 points 2 years ago

Typical Lemmy experience, haha.

Honestly has its charms, gives me the feeling of nostalgia, like we're back in the early 2000's.

[-] tunahanyilmaz@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

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.

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[-] Hikiru@lemmy.world 22 points 2 years ago

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

[-] Zikeji@programming.dev 14 points 2 years 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 4 points 2 years 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.

[-] OtakuAltair@vlemmy.net 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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 (that arent overloaded) 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.

[-] burningmatches@feddit.uk 8 points 2 years ago

Instance-agnostic links to posts would be good too.

[-] frogge@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years 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 9 points 2 years 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.

[-] Undearius@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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.

[-] Rannoch@lemm.ee 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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.

[-] Spzi@lemm.ee 4 points 2 years 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 3 points 2 years 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 3 points 2 years 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.

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[-] fishos@kbin.social 2 points 2 years 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.

Ahhhh that makes so much sense. I was wondering why some communities with a large number of active users only had like 3 subscribers.

[-] stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 years ago

i sometimes wonder if it works the same for upvotes?

[-] zinklog@lemmy.fmhy.ml 4 points 2 years 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.

[-] stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 years ago

ah so that's why I've been seeing conflicting upvote counts. Thats good to know thanks!

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[-] muddybulldog@mylemmy.win 2 points 2 years 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 6 points 2 years 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?

[-] Ansalong@lemm.ee 4 points 2 years ago

This had me confused for a while and I eventually decided it had to be this. Glad to have it confirmed!!

[-] boots@lemmy.fmhy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

New to Lemmy. I also found the stats confusing. I expected to see global community stats and for them to be synced between instances.

The current situation makes people think that Lemmy is basically empty 😅

[-] _MoveSwiftly@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

Hello there, and welcome to our community! I hope you like it in here.

Could you please include some body text as to why should people know this, and how would that help them? It’s our second rule. Thank you :)

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[-] snakesnakewhale@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

D'oh, my Lemmy Explorer count is three lower than my sh.itjust.works count for my lil poetry community. 😔

[-] ShunkW@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years 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 3 points 2 years 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.

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.

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[-] henfredemars@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years 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.

[-] bluejay@partizle.com 3 points 2 years ago

I actually ran into this while setting up this account. Made me triple check I was subbing to a community that was going to have any activity (first person from my instance to search it apparently)

[-] Holodeck_Moriarty@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years 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.ml 2 points 2 years 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.

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.

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[-] mac12m99@feddit.it 2 points 2 years ago

I think it's a good idea to sum these statistics, but not for all instances (as it will be super easy to hijack with fake instances). Admin should manually select instances they trust and get the subscribed count summed.

[-] NewBrainWhoThis@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Are there plans to display the actual numer or is it just not possible becaus of the underlying protocol?

[-] OtakuAltair@vlemmy.net 4 points 2 years ago

It's definitely possible at least, some solutions are suggested in this github issue

[-] mintiefresh@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 years ago

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

[-] Fluba@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] Secret300@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Good to know

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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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