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.
I’m new to Lemmy and just discovered this myself. When looking at subscriber numbers in the community list it only applies to your local instance.
Though post counts and reply counts seem to be federation wide so if you’re looking for active communities, that would be an indicator. Unfortunately there are no sort or filter functions on the list. That’s a glaring interface omission in my mind.
As mentioned you can use lemmyverse.net to filter and sort, but it would be preferable to do that from within the community list inside Lemmy.