YSK: Subscriber count on communities only show the numbers of users subscribed from your specific instance. The real number might be much larger than you think.
It’s the exact same post, with the same user who created it and everything.
But on the Geddit instance, you have several comments answering the question. On the Beehaw instance, you only see my test post (which you won’t find on the geddit’s version).
And truth be told, I have no idea why there’s a difference there. Both servers are federated with eachother: beehaw.org/instances and geddit.social/instances
And yet, there’s a difference.
edit
One thing I could think off is that maybe it’s not federating because there are no subscribers there. I’ll try that next.
This makes so much sense! I was trying to figure out how Lemmy.world communities were so much more active when another instance (or kbin) copy of the community/magazine seemed to have a higher subscriber count. But I’m on other Lemmy instances and Kbin so I wasn’t seeing the lemmy.world subscriber counts.
Is “how many people from your own instance subscribe” even a useful metric? I don’t see what value it brings, I don’t care how many people on there happen to also come from my instance, I just want to know which instance has the most active version of this community.
What do you mean by “established” though? Is a community with 80 people from my instance and 500 more across all other instances less established than one with 250 people from my instance and 30 more across all other instances? If so, how? Legitimate question - I’m new here and it’s possible there’s a good reason to care, but I can’t see one.
That would require each subscribing instance to report its number of local subscribers to the instance hosting the community, which would then add up the numbers and report the total back to the subscribers. That seems like it would be easy to manipulate, where one malicious instance could misreport local subscriber numbers to change the apparent relative popularities of different communities throughout the fediverse.
I mean if that’s what we worry about then essentially everything could have that problem. What’s to stop an instance from artificially increasing their upvote counts so their posts are always at the top.
Sure, but the amount of work involved scales differently. To inflate post or comment rankings by a thousand votes, you’d need to create a thousand separate fake upvotes per item, whereas for subscription totals you misreport one number and the effect is permanent. That would make malicious actors harder to detect.
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