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. 🙁
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.
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
Thank you for the explanation, it’s much more helpful than the bot’s message.
In this case specifically, the point of the URLs in my post is to show how the difference in how the subscriber stat for a community is displayed when it’s viewed from instances other than your home instance.
Yeah, this is the rare case where you do actually want the direct link. In general though the bot is very helpful.
Sorry, I don’t agree. Telling people they need to “fix” something that is a universal standard everywhere else across the web is poor framing, and its explanation as to what issues it’s actually trying to address is pithy and unclear.
I have no issue with there being a better way to internally link to communities within lemmy; it’s essentially a lemmy-specific handles format for communities. But I don’t think this bot does a good job of communicating that, especially to new users who have every reasonable expectation that a link is a good way to point to any place on the web.
Author here, I’m very open to better wording if you have one.
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.