Possible community stats bug (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by n3mo@programming.dev to c/wefwef@lemmy.world

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I’ve discovered a possible bug in how wefwef is parsing or displaying community statistics. For example, at the time of this writing, c/science at lemmy.ml shows the following stats in their sidebar:

Users / day: 12 Users / week: 54 Users / month: 157 Users/ 6 months: 244 Subscribers: 8.27k Posts: 1.23k Comments: 1.29k

As the screenshot of the sidebar in wefwef shows, only the “users / day” stat is correct. Wefwef shows 80 subscribers rather than 8.27k.

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[-] n3mo@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

This also applies to the search results within wefwef, which also shows the 80 subscribers error. This makes it difficult to identify active communities when looking for new topics.

[-] n3mo@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

Ok, continuing to think out loud. It seems that searching from within my instance with a web browser also shows the 80 subscribers (well, 81 now that I’ve subscribed). So I’m not sure what’s responsible for the error. Nonetheless that’s a huge discrepancy between what the community’s sidebar claims 🤷‍♂️

[-] mlc894@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago

I don’t think it’s an error - I think that stat shows only the number of subscribers from your instance, not the total number of subscribers from all instances.

[-] n3mo@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

I was beginning to suspect that… I’m guessing that’s all the info my instance has on another instance’s community. I guess I’ll stick to the community browser on feddit.de for searching.

Maybe wefwef could one day search through that service instead of one’s own instance…

[-] Fester@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

https://lemmyverse.net/ is another good one and my personal favorite. Note the instances and communities tab at the top, and other filter/search options.

Clicking the !URL copies it your clipboard, so you can easily paste it to your search bar and find it even if your instance hasn’t connected to that community yet.

This is more of a backend issue that the Lemmy/Fediverse devs should add, I think, but apps automatically searching through these sites would be a convenient workaround for now, if it’s possible. Ultimately I think we’d all like to see all of the votes and stats from all instances all the time.

[-] n3mo@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago

This looks nice—thanks for sharing!

[-] BackStabbath@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I realised that earlier but I don't like it, it's just not a very useful metric to the end user if it's not total users lol

[-] n3mo@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago

Yes, particularly if you join a small instance and are unaware of the community search options that capture better statistics. It will give new, naive users the sense that all communities are tiny and inactive.

[-] BackStabbath@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Exactly. I kept getting the feeling that there are barely any users on Lemmy. This does almost no good. It's ok to show both but not only the instance's numbers.

[-] nanometer@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

This is correct

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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023

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