When I go to a community page (not signed in) I see thousands of subscribers, but when I access the community from within my account, I am shown dramatically less subscribers. I am a new convert from Reddit and don't understand what is going on.
Another community I wanted to join with 1.5k subscribers and lots of posts, came up as zero subscribers and no posts when I searched for and went when signed in. It showed that it was the correct community page, but nothing there.
Am I on a bad server?
The subscriber count you see is how many on your instance have subscribed.
There are typically more, which is demonstrated by the screenshot you put up.
Ah thanks, it was quite confusing. Maybe a little note on the interface. Do you know where I could make this suggestion?
I expect that it has heen made. Even better would be for the actual number of subscribers, or at least an estimate, would be better.
I think the lemmy github page has an issue tracker that you can add it to. (Sorry on mobile)
Worth noting that some of this isn't always 💯 possible. If some instances have blocked other instances where users have interacted with a post, your numbers and their numbers will diverge. The host of the content generally will have the most complete numbers, but it might be possible for that to be wrong if the server doesn't have authorized fetch enabled (ie: server a has content, blocks server b, server c boosts the content but does not block c, c boosts/upvotes/favorites it. A now doesn't know about any metrics from server C, despite being the original source of content).