• AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
      6·
      3 年前

      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·
        3 年前

        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·
          3 年前

          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·
      3 年前

      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·
    3 年前

    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.

      • Milx@lemmy.world
        10·
        3 年前

        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.

  • Nachorella@vlemmy.net
    4·
    3 年前

    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·
      3 年前

      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·
    3 年前

    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.

  • Awhiskeydrunker@kbin.social
    3·
    3 年前

    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.