this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
23 points (96.0% liked)

Asklemmy

43918 readers
1758 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I created two accounts on two different instances and all the communities I see have different subscriber counts depending from which account I look. Why does that happen and how can I see the real subscriber count?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] AlmightySnoo 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but here's how I understand it:

Say you have two instances A and B that are federated together, and you have a community C in B.

If you look at C from within B, the subscriber count will give you the number of subscribers from B and will ignore the ones from other instances.

If you look at C@B from within A, you will see this time the number of subscribers who have their accounts on A.

[โ€“] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Why did you formulate it so complex? ๐Ÿ˜‚

The subscribers are from your local instance. The end.

[โ€“] AlmightySnoo 8 points 1 year ago

math nerds always love introducing notation ๐Ÿ˜

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

But is this true?

If member 1@A subscribes to B/c/C instead of A/c/C then will B's subscriber count include 1@A?

If that's true you would have to say: The subscribers displayed are those subscribed to that instance, regardless of where their account exists.

Which would mean the most accurate count would be the original community.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there a way then to see all subscribers from all instances?

[โ€“] AlmightySnoo 1 points 1 year ago

haven't figured that out yet!

[โ€“] PriorProject 2 points 1 year ago

If you look at C from within B, the subscriber count will give you the number of subscribers from B and will ignore the ones from other instances.

It's always been my belief that when viewing a community on the community's home server, you see the global subscriber count including both subscribers on that instance and federated subscribers. That count is always bigger than the count on any subscribing instance, which only makes sense if the community's instance counts federated subscribers.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I've suggested one correction below, but I'm not sure this is right, either.

I have an instance with just me, yet I see thousands of subscribers. I think what is happening is the count is the number of users who have federated info on the instance. (This is an educated guess, I have not investigated the code).

The theory is it's counting users in your local DB that have comments/likes/posts in the instance's local version of the federated community.

In this case, the accurate count of users is the originating instance.