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?

  • ShadowA
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    1 year ago

    Ignore the user counts you see. That’s only users on your local instance that are subbed to it, not all.

  • NicoCharrua
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    1 year ago

    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

    • moreeni@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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

      • NicoCharrua
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        1 year ago

        Are you sure? See [email protected]

        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.

        • moreeni@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          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

  • can@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Lemmy only shows you how many people are subscribed from your instance. So it’s not only 30 members, it’s 30 members registered from the same instance you’re on.

    • NumG@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      But here’s the thing I don’t understand. If there is a community tech@instanceA and tech@instanceB, are these two individual communities or are the posts shared between the instances? So does it matter at what instance a community located? I had guessed no, it doesn’t matter and you are always subscribing to a certain topic, not a topic@instance, but I am not sure

  • csfirecracker@lemmyf.uk
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    1 year ago

    Right now that is a bit of a sticking point with Lemmy. Right now, as far as I can tell, none of the apps for lemmy really do discovery.

    If you are on an instance with a large amount of people, the easiest way is probably your instance’s communities list. This can be found by going to your lemmy instances web domain (in your case programming.dev) and log in. On desktop it will just show a little “communities” link in the top left you can click on, on the mobile site you have to tap trending -> explore communities.

    What this “communities” list does is list every community that anyone on your instance has subscribed to. Subscriber and daily active user numbers may not be accurate as they as far as I can tell only count your instance’s users.

    What I did when I first started lemmy was go through this list and subscribe to any community that remotely interested me.

    The place where you will be able to see the absolute most number of communities is a lemmy indexer like lemmyverse.net which lists almost all instances and has all of their communities listed.

    Other than that, though, I think discoverability is something actively being developed on the lemmy platform.

    Hope this was helpful and you enjoy your time here o7

  • Candelestine@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    When you search for communities, make sure you’re using the setting to search all instances, instead of just your local instance. Not sure how the UI is set up on Boost.

  • Anamana@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    The one I can see has 80, but fyi these counts are buggy anyway. So don’t rely on them.