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.
Good to know
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 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
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 If B holds number of subscription requests it’s out of date.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’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.
In fact, the subscriber count on c/Games is on lemmy.world itself 8.67K and on lemmyverse.net 7.9K. What gives?
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)
Huh. I have 140-something showing as subscribed on c/cocktails and maybe 15 participating actively in a way I can see (commenting or posting) but it doesn’t even exist in that lemmyverse link. Just an empty community called “cocktail” and a midwest social one.
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 :)
Oops my bad, I’ll update the post
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.
Lemmy currently misses a sync feature across servers. Meaning that moving one lose all subscription and messages.
The real solutions should be a distributed network to support federation, instead than a plain federated one, i.e. an automated redistribution of users and loads across servers (lemmy instances).
I don’t know how they are planning to manage it on the long run
Automatically distributing users across instances fails to treat them as independently operate websites. That’s not going to fly.
Viewing everything through a user lens, and ignoring that site operators may have site specific goals is, uh, not ok.
It can be done still keeping independent instances, by just distributing data and load across instances connected to the network, depending on their available resources, instead of explicitly creating new duplicated users on each instance.
It however require a lot of work and effort. I don’t know if anyone will ever manage to implement it.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
Thank you for posting this. I had no idea and always wondered why the numbers were so different between my accounts.
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?
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.
What? It’s your post? The fediverse is so small lol.
ah so that’s why I’ve been seeing conflicting upvote counts. Thats good to know thanks!
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.
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?
I’ve posted a feature request on the Lemmy GitHub to fix this, I hope they do something
