I’m new to this but I don’t understand how you’re meant to find the correct biggest community if it’s on a different server than the one you’re on.

If I search for it I only see communities on the same server as me. How do I know if a community just doesn’t exist or if it’s just on a different server?

Is there a way to search for the largest community across all servers?

  • OtterEnglish
    5•1 year ago

    Feel free to post in [email protected] :)

    We also have a guide on finding communities pinned on [email protected]

    As for your question:

    I use lemmyverse.net to find a few communities. Usually one is actively used and the rest are dead. If a few have recent posts, I’ll subscribe to them all to get the content. Later you can post to all of them, or the one you like more (friendly moderators, nicer discussions, etc.)

    Unfortunately to see total subscriptions, you either need to go to the instance itself or wait for 0.19 to fix the issue where it shows the lower count (number from your instance only)

    • @Edmund_Across_The_RoomOPEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      When I searched for that first community on boost for Lemmy I noticed that it did show some other communities from instances.

      So you’re saying it only shows subscribers from my instance. So the actual number would be higher?

      • OtterEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        I’m not sure how Boost implements it, but two different ways it might go

        • Searching for communities on your instance (from the browser) will only show foreign communities that are (A) from instances your one is federated with and (B) subscribed to by someone on your instance. This is because the server just hasn’t fetched the other communities (because it doesn’t talk to defederated instances, and because there could be an infinite number of communities out there so it only loads the ones being used)
        • https://lemmyverse.net collects data on communities by itself, outside the instances, and so it is more likely to show you the big picture.

        As for the subscribed numbers, that is correct.

        You can see this in depth discussion here and compare: https://lemmy.ca/post/5674368

        I also made a post the other day in this community to request that Boost show the correct subscriber count, but people pointed out that this is being changed in the next Lemmy version anyways: https://lemmy.ca/post/9717821