this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
157 points (98.8% liked)

General Discussion

12096 readers
4 users here now

Welcome to Lemmy.World General!

This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.


πŸͺ† About Lemmy World


🧭 Finding CommunitiesFeel free to ask here or over in: !lemmy411@lemmy.ca!

Also keep an eye on:

For more involved tools to find communities to join: check out Lemmyverse!


πŸ’¬ Additional Discussion Focused Communities:


Rules

Remember, Lemmy World rules also apply here.0. See: Rules for Users.

  1. No bigotry: including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
  2. Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
  3. Be thoughtful and helpful: even with β€˜silly’ questions. The world won’t be made better by dismissive comments to others on Lemmy.
  4. Link posts should include some context/opinion in the body text when the title is unaltered, or be titled to encourage discussion.
  5. Posts concerning other instances' activity/decisions are better suited to !fediverse@lemmy.world or !lemmydrama@lemmy.world communities.
  6. No Ads/Spamming.
  7. No NSFW content.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/536440

You can use https://lemmyverse.net/ to check actual subscriber numbers.

top 19 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] itadakimasu@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We need to have both numbers shown on the lemmi UI. It's silly not to

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Empyreus@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] TeaHands@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

It's such an obviously weird stat to use, I've been assuming there must be some technical reason why it's more complicated than we might think.

[–] Milx@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ohlaph@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is if you're looking for an established community.

[–] Milx@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

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.

I was wondering about that. Some communities seemed WAY too active for like 40 subscribers, lol

[–] Nachorella@vlemmy.net 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's good to know. I though some communities seemed larger than the numbers suggested. Would be good to get both numbers visible.

[–] Tilted@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

I agree with this. I find both numbers interesting, but the total number of subscribers seems more interesting than the local number.

[–] mintiefresh@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago

Makes so much more sense now.

I hope this is something they can fix in the future. It's much more useful to see total subscribers overall.

Good to know.

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.

Thanks for sharing this knowledge.

[–] barthol5280@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

I'm seeing "X users/ month" so its showing number of active users VS total users?

[–] madjo@geddit.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also, not all comments on posts get federated equally.

[–] ClockworkN@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh? This is news to me. If you can please explain.

[–] madjo@geddit.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'll give you two links to the same post but on two different Lemmy instances:

https://geddit.social/post/17196

and

https://beehaw.org/post/659342

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:
https://beehaw.org/instances and https://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.

[–] pgetsos@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I think lemmyverse doesn't count kbin users btw

[–] Wiggler@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Defo good to know! Hadn’t realised that

load more comments
view more: next β€Ί