• Milx@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Is “how many people from your own instance subscribe” even a useful metric? I don’t see what value it brings, I don’t care how many people on there happen to also come from my instance, I just want to know which instance has the most active version of this community.

      • Milx@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        What do you mean by “established” though? Is a community with 80 people from my instance and 500 more across all other instances less established than one with 250 people from my instance and 30 more across all other instances? If so, how? Legitimate question - I’m new here and it’s possible there’s a good reason to care, but I can’t see one.

      • madjo@geddit.social
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        1 year ago

        I’ll give you two links to the same post but on two different Lemmy instances:

        https://geddit.social/post/17196

        and

        https://beehaw.org/post/659342

        It’s the exact same post, with the same user who created it and everything.

        But on the Geddit instance, you have several comments answering the question. On the Beehaw instance, you only see my test post (which you won’t find on the geddit’s version).

        And truth be told, I have no idea why there’s a difference there. Both servers are federated with eachother:
        https://beehaw.org/instances and https://geddit.social/instances
        And yet, there’s a difference.

        edit
        One thing I could think off is that maybe it’s not federating because there are no subscribers there. I’ll try that next.

    • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That would require each subscribing instance to report its number of local subscribers to the instance hosting the community, which would then add up the numbers and report the total back to the subscribers. That seems like it would be easy to manipulate, where one malicious instance could misreport local subscriber numbers to change the apparent relative popularities of different communities throughout the fediverse.

      • Empyreus@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I mean if that’s what we worry about then essentially everything could have that problem. What’s to stop an instance from artificially increasing their upvote counts so their posts are always at the top.