There are a lot of communities I haven't subscribed to since there were only 1-2 other users. I've also noticed that some communities started out strong and seemed to practically die.
But today I was looking for a community and searched through lemmy.world instead of my own instance. Turns out the subscribers never left - I just can't see them. For example:
- if I search !dccomics@lemmy.ml using my home instance on liftoff, I see 2 subscribers
- if I look up the same community using lemmy.world, I see 58 subscribers
- if I look up the community in Google (not logged in), I see 58 subscribers
- if I click on the !dccomics@lemmy.ml link in my own post, I see 110 subscribers
- if I search using my home instance for new communities, say !curatedtumblr@sh.itjust.works , there's 1 subscriber and no posts
- if I access !curatedtumblr@sh.itjust.works through my saved committees list, I can see posts
I've noticed the same issues on !lemmy.world and !sh.itjust.works , but I can only say that for sure because I know those instances should have more traffic. I don't think my instance has defederated with theirs.
Does anyone know of this is an issue with liftoff, lemmy, or simple defederation?
Idk if it's in Liftoff, but on the web you click the !communityname link on the top, that redirects you to the community's home instance with full sub count.
Is the sub count on the home instance only for that instance or does it actually aggregate counts from all remote instances too?
From my testing, it aggregates from remote instances too.