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?
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.
Why did you formulate it so complex? 😂
The subscribers are from your local instance. The end.
math nerds always love introducing notation 😁
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.
Is there a way then to see all subscribers from all instances?
haven’t figured that out yet!
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.
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.
deleting this; see ask_lemmy rule 3
