You Should Know

Yeah, there currently seem to be a bunch of rough edges with Lemmy. Another is that iirc editing a comment increases the comment count shown on a post.

Nothing that can't be fixed though, and it's encouraging how good Lemmy feels already compared to reddit (for me at least).

I'd be happy to see it divided by total users in an instance; 21.7% of the users on bands.music are subscribed to Beatles, 1.3% are subscribed to Soundgarden, so on.

Imagine the guys developing Lemmy. For years this was a fun hobby project and all of a sudden Reddit decides to implode giving you magnitudes more users and servers requesting changes.

Yes, I also hope Lemmy becomes more user friendly. I think it is okay-ish by now. Some things are great, others are still a little terrible.

Mostly, I want to point at ongoing development and encourage anyone who can to support it. You can even post bounties on specific issues to encourage developers to work on that.

It'll only get better from here at least. There are good suggestions floating around that, if implemented, will make Lemmy a lot easier to use as a platform. Having an easier on-boarding experience like Mastodon will go a long way, and people have suggested being able to merge communities by having them mirror each-other which would be great.

But I think people need to let go of the idea that Lemmy should cater to the average person or be bigger than Reddit. The Fediverse isn't a replacement for social media, it's an alternative. We don't need 100 million active users. I'm pretty happy at where we are now, and hope that the community will grow over time to maybe get to one million.

Yeah, the way instances are not that well aware of other instances is a big barrier. In particular, it's extra difficult to be the first in your instance to subscribe to a community. And the "all" feed in small instances sucks because it only includes what people on your instance have subscribed to.

I actually think some technological hurdle is a good thing. If it's a little difficult to join, that will act as its own filter to keep the laziest and lowest effort people away.

Instance-agnostic links to posts would be good too.

It's definitely possible at least, some solutions are suggested in this github issue

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 sometimes wonder if it works the same for upvotes?

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.

Being a mod doesn't change anything. If the community is from your instance it will be accurate. If not, in the sidebar under the name of the community there is a link to visit the community on the site of the home instance. You can click that to see the community on it's home site amd that will show the accurate count.

Subscriber count isn't really that helpful though, better to look at the active user coints, which seem to be mostly accurate regardless of which instance you are viewing from.

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.

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.

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 now 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