Maybe it’s an instance thing, maybe it’s a Boost thing, but when I search for communities with the simple term “fitness” for example, I only get 5 results that have like, 30 members max.
I’m totally down with organically growing my community list over time just based on links and recommendations, but it is a bit annoying to not find communities when I’m pretty sure that they should exist.
Does anyone have tips on how to find things better?
Lemmy’s subscriber user count is usually wrong.
You only see the true number if the community is on your instance
Check the community from the original instance to see the actual number of subscribers
If you’re searching for instances, you should use https://lemmyverse.net/communities since it lets you quickly compare subscribers, shows you more results and also is just better overall
You never see the true number. Lemmy is preconfigured to only display subscribers from your instance, so if you visit a community from, say, lemm.ee you will only see the number of subscribers from that particular instance, even if it is the one where the community is hosted
Are you sure? See !fiction@literature.cafe
It has 585 subscribers as seen from the original instance, but literature.cafe only has 162 users. How is that possible?
Also, if I unsub and resub to communities I can see the subscribed number going up and down in the instance where the community is hosted.
It’s a config, which can be changed and the “total” amount could be displayed. The reason it is not enabled by default because of federation issues, which might cause the number to be wrong, I think. It could be that it was fixed and newer versions of Lemmy enable this by default though