You can use https://lemmyverse.net/ to check actual subscriber numbers.

Edit: Why YSK: New users of Lemmy can find the number low and think that a community is dead or inactive, when infact it might be a thriving place with a lot of activity.

  • 9point6@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’d say that’s pretty much it—querying the database locally for subscriber counts was probably a very simple feature to add, at least versus collating totals from other instances (perhaps would need more data sending over activitypub to facilitate it)

    That and it helps pick communities to subscribe to, so there’s value enough in the local count to be able to determine at a glance which communities are active, without having to go into each one.