YSK About Trending Communities

You Should Know@lemmy.world – 217 points – 12 months ago

This is a bot driven community which scans subscriber counts daily and uses the difference to generate a list of trending communities. Great for discovering new, active and growing communities!

Thanks, I subscribed.

Appreciate this but by what I've observed that many communities have a lot of people subscribe to them but have no posts.

Yeah I clicked this link and it's completely blank for me. No posts, no nothing.

Sometimes you have to change your post sorting option once you click through to the community to see all the posts. I have mine set to "Top Twelve Hours" as the default because I like that for my front page, but once I get into the community I often have to change it to "New" and then I'll see a lot more posts.

Crazy how much of the fediverse activity is on lemmy.world - and is swaps for the usual subreddit suspects

I blame unfederated subscriber counts. If you look up any community from an account on lemmy.world and there is a local version and a remote version... the local version LOOKS bigger when it's about half the size because the remote version only shows subscribers from lemmy.world whereas the local version shows subs fediverse-wide.

If sub counts were apples to apples for remote and local communities, people would much more frequently sub to the bigger remote comminity. But lemmy.world is so big, that when people are subbing locally because they're confused about which is bigger... the lemmy.world community actually becomes bigger very quickly. So it's winning the community scaling races consistently on pure confusion. The resulting community centralization is not all that healthy and they often overtake better run and more established communities for no meaningful reason.

I'm with you on all points

How can one avoid this "trap?"

As an individual?

Browse for communities to sub on lemmyverse.net rather than your instance's community list. It will show apples to apples activity rankings.
If you do use your instance's community browser, cross-reference subscriber counts by visiting the community's page on its home instance. That will provide a comparable sub count to what's shown for local communities on your instance.
Pay attention to how mods behave. Do they have a well-specified set of rules in the sidebar? Do they organize megathreads when necessary? Stalk them on the modlog to see if they are fairly enforcing the rules or power-tripping. This gives you a metric other than size to evaluate community health. One prominent sports community on Lemmy.world recently became the largest for its topic in the most recent user-signup wave while effectively being unmoderated. It overtook an older, more established, and better run community on another instance and it's too late for accurate size-metrics to help anyone understand the difference between these communities now. You have to look at mod activity to see that one mod team solicited community feedback on rules, enforced them fairly, set up raceday discussion threads, and had fruitful policy discussions and calm disagreements with subscribers. The other was absent for days at a time, ignored mentions, didn't set up rules, ignored conflicts between users, the showed up to remove posts trying to jumpstart policy discussions, and basically was AWOL until some users of the community petitioned the admins to take over the community. It's probably going to head in a better direction now that there are finally more mods on board, but its dominant growth phase occured while an absent mod was squatting it and doing nothing much of use, the only thing that mattered was being on lemmy.world with misleading subscriber counts and that was enough to become what is now genuinely the biggest community for its topic.

As the threadiverse overall, I think community discovery within Lemmy just has to be a lot better. I'm not sure what that looks like in its entirety, but I'm confident that a critical piece of the experience is comparable activity metrics for local and remote communities being prominent in Lemmy's native community browser.

Thanks for the detailed answer!

thank you for telling us!

Weird, I see no content there from my instance but if I open it normally I can see the two posts

It depends on if you were the first person on your instance to subscribe, and if that subscription happened before or after the posts were made. Lemmy doesn't do backfilling content, which means only new content after the subscription happens will be visible to your instance. I'm not a fan of that personally, but I can see why they did it that way.

AFAIK lemmy will backfill older content but at the lowest priority.

Oh that's interesting, that's the first I've heard of it. I wonder how one would go about testing if that works.

not sure, I just know that I've seen some communities I follow get a flood of older posts federating through every now and then.

Oh, thanks for explaining that. I started following some kbin magazines on my instance and thought there was maybe a sync issue, but no new posts have been created yet, so this makes a lot more sense!

It's coming up as empty for me too, how can that be if others from this instance have already subscribed? Does my subscription need to be approved or something?

how can that be if others from this instance have already subscribed?

How certain are you that the community was already subscribed to? You may be the first person on your instance to subscribe there. If that's the case you'll only be seeing anything posted after you subscribed.

That is, unless Faceman is correct, in which case lemmy.world will eventually backfill content when it can.

For example, I'm seeing three posts there on both my instance and when I visit https://feddit.nl/c/trendingcommunities. I'm fairly sure that when I first subscribed I could only see the first post, but definitely not sure that's the case.

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl

Thanks bot, but you weren't needed in this particular case. You're a Good Bot though.

Well I'm on lemmy.world, which I understand to be the largest instance, so I assumed someone would probably have subscribed before me.

https://lemmy.world/c/trendingcommunities@feddit.nl still comes up empty for me, but on https://feddit.nl/c/trendingcommunities I can see three posts.

I'm also struggling to load some of the comments on this thread, they just keep loading endlessly. If lemmy.world needs to run some sort of process to fetch posts from federated instances then maybe these two issues indicate that the server is overloaded at the moment? Sorry for my cluelessness, I'm new to the fediverse.

so I assumed someone would probably have subscribed before me

I think the community is very new, so there's a decent chance you were the first. As to the overloading problem, it's certainly possible. Lemmy.world has a ton of users, and while I know ruud is dedicating a lot of resources to your lemmy instance, it just may not be enough to keep performance great. There's been a lot of reports of performance problems by both lemmy.world users and federation problems between .world and other lemmy instances, most likely from being overloaded. You might try setting up a secondary account on another instance if you're inclined, can't hurt. Then at least you'll be able to compare. Mine is on sh.itjust.works and everything has been pretty decent for me since the latest software upgrade, just as a point of reference.

Sorry for my cluelessness, I’m new to the fediverse

No worries mate, we're all new here. I'm still getting used to things too.

Maybe this is a stupid question but following that link on my phone takes me to a place to login on Reddit.nl, my username doesn’t work there. I also tried myusername@my.instance and it didn’t work. So how’s the best way to subscribe to these?

On Kbin I search for this: @trendingcommunities @ feddit.nl (no spaces)

And subscribe to the community/magazine in the search results.

For you it's probably available at: Lemmy.world/c/trendingcommunities

Why the shit does this link take me to the community in Voyager but the link in the main post opens in a browser?

Test post to see how to make the link clickable in a way that opens it in apps.

/c/trendingcommunities@feddit.nl

Edit: this worked

Not for me, I see no posts on that link.

If you’re the first subscriber from your server you need to subscribe and then refresh

Refreshing the browser does nothing, is there something else that I need to refresh?

Are you sitting by top? It only has a couple posts but you should be able to see them if you sort by hot or active

Still nothing.