Subscriber count on federated magazines not accuretely shown

Balssh@kbin.social to /kbin meta@kbin.social – 6 points –

While reading this article https://kbin.social/m/france@lemmy.world/t/97300/Consulation-sur-la-direction-de-cette-communaute I observed OP said something about the community being over 1000 members, yet in the sidebar it was showing to me (in kBin) there were only 92. I double checked by going to lemmy.world and those 92 were ONLINE subscribers.

Has anyone else encountered this bug?

2

I asked this question on one of my Lemmy alts (still playing around if I prefer lemmy or kbin) and what I was told is the stats you are seeing when you view an external instance are the subscribers from YOUR instance. So you are viewing a lemmy.world magazine/community through kbin, the 92 is kbin subscribers for that community. To get the real number you need to view the stats on the original instance (the 1000 you saw).

I think its a pretty big flaw with the fediverse software right now and I think should be a priority fix (if it is at all possible to do that). Makes magazines/communities look inactive when you are searching for them on your instance if they are external. It drives people away from subscribing (I know it did me when I didn't understand it at first) when you do a search on your instance as you just think there is no activity and don't even bother clicking it. I imagine it would get pretty extreme if you host your own private lemmy or kbin and when searching for things to subscribe to on your instance, everything looks empty.

Makes sense what you explained. And I'm pretty positive it should be possible to display the correct number of subscribers as it's just a field in a database (I might be ignorant about how things are build on the fediverse and if so please excuse my dumb ramblings).