How do you find THE community on Lemmy (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago by Edmund_Across_The_Room@lemmy.world to c/boostforlemmy@lemmy.world

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I'm new to this but I don't understand how you're meant to find the correct biggest community if it's on a different server than the one you're on.

If I search for it I only see communities on the same server as me. How do I know if a community just doesn't exist or if it's just on a different server?

Is there a way to search for the largest community across all servers?

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[-] Edmund_Across_The_Room@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

When I searched for that first community on boost for Lemmy I noticed that it did show some other communities from instances.

So you're saying it only shows subscribers from my instance. So the actual number would be higher?

[-] otter@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 months ago

I'm not sure how Boost implements it, but two different ways it might go

Searching for communities on your instance (from the browser) will only show foreign communities that are (A) from instances your one is federated with and (B) subscribed to by someone on your instance. This is because the server just hasn't fetched the other communities (because it doesn't talk to defederated instances, and because there could be an infinite number of communities out there so it only loads the ones being used)
https://lemmyverse.net collects data on communities by itself, outside the instances, and so it is more likely to show you the big picture.

As for the subscribed numbers, that is correct.

You can see this in depth discussion here and compare: https://lemmy.ca/post/5674368

I also made a post the other day in this community to request that Boost show the correct subscriber count, but people pointed out that this is being changed in the next Lemmy version anyways: https://lemmy.ca/post/9717821

this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023

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