So I just searched for an alternative to r/SteamDeck and used the “all” comunity search from lemm.ee
The community with the most subscribers was sopuli.xyz/c/steamdeck and it showed as having 105 subscribers.
However when I use browse.feddit.de to search for it, it is listed as having 3379 subscribers.
Now when I enter that community with sopuli.xyz/c/steamdeck I see that it has 3.48K subscribers right now.
But when I enter it with lemm.ee/c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz it only shows 105 subscribers.
So my question is does that mean that it has 105 subscribers from lemm.ee and that count is all I see when entering from this instance?
If so, does that mean that I can’t search for communities based on subscriber count within lemm.ee directly?
(in this case I still made the right choice but I subscribed to many other instances based on the community search on lemm.ee that I now have to double check if those really are the biggest ones or just the ones with the most lemm.ee users subscribed)
Edit: subscriber count aside, I see more users/day and users/week etc when accessing it from lemm.ee, but the comment count is acutally less even though lemm.ee hasn’t any blocked instances and also isn’t blocked by any other instance.
https://imgur.com/0mkCjW0
(top=sopuli, bottom=lemmee)
This all doesn’t really add up for me.
Unfortunately yes, that’s the way it works right now.
I agree it’s not really ideal. I believe it can be improved in the future, though.
These numbers can get out of sync when there are any problems with federation. But the same applies here as well - I think this can and will be improved soon!
By the way, I know this isn’t a proper solution, but as a workaround I actually prefer using https://lemmyverse.net to browse communities now, because you can set your home instance there and that will automatically link you to any community directly on your home instance!
Thanks for that tip, that’s actually really useful indeed.