Feature request: display the total number of subs to a community on its native instance, not just how many are subbed to it on my local instance.
Feature request: display the total number of subs to a community on its native instance, not just how many are subbed to it on my local instance.
I signed up for an account through a smaller instance that felt like it suited me, and I'm trying to build out my feed and subscribe to communities across the federated network. But it's a pain that in the search summary and in the header of viewing an individual community, the number of subscribers shown isn't actually a count of how many people are subscribed to it. It's how many people are subscribed to it, from my local instance.
Obviously being on an instance with fewer users this means the number is small on just about everything, but even for users on larger instances looking to sub to communities on federated instances, this count is underreporting. The RPG community on ttrpg.network has 1.96k subscribers, but viewed through lemmy.world it would appear to only have 301. Viewed through my local instance, it shows as only having 13. π
The subscriber count is the only stat provided in Sync's search listings view and in the header of an individual sub. It should be a useful metric for determining which communities across the network are getting good traction, but under this current setup, it's not.
Would it be possible to display the total number of subs each community has, on its native instance or across all instances (does anyone more familiar with Lemmy's technical architecture know if federated subscriptions are included in this count)? Or, would you consider replacing this stat with a more useful metric to gauge the sub's popularity, like the active users per week, which seems(?) to be a community stat that is federated across all instances?
Thanks for your work on Sync! Excited to make it one of my daily go-tos again.
Post this on the GitHub issue tracker so LJ will actually see it.
If someone who already has a GitHub account wants to post this there, feel free. π It would be really weird if LJ were not also monitoring their own community the day after launch. π
I copied your post into an issue here.
Thank you; much appreciated!
Lemmy doesn't have that data afaik. Your instance only knows about local subs, and if instances trusted remote data then people would fuck with it.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !rpg@ttrpg.network
Absolutely not. A URL is meant to be universal. If instances want to have some kind of custom shortcut format to linkify communities from just their name, that's cool, but I should not be getting nag messages for using an actual URL as they're meant to be used. There is nothing to "fix" in my post. Please fix your bot.
This isn't some instance specific feature or a custom shortcut -- it's a feature of Lemmy. The link posted by the bot works perfectly fine on both the lemmy-ui (browser) and on sync.
The reason why your link is problematic is because it will take people off their home instance, the other format keeps people on it. The bot is trying to suggest a way of linking internally to Lemmy that's more user friendly than just an URL to a different instance
The problem with linking the full URL is that users from other instances accessing Lemmy from a browser and clicking the link will be taken off their home instance to view the community. Ideally this could be fixed by the official Lemmy software at some point, but at this moment that's how it works, and this is the reason the format
!community@instance.tldhas become standard. This way everyone can see the community from their home instance and immediately subscribe/post/comment.