I’ve discovered a possible bug in how wefwef is parsing or displaying community statistics. For example, at the time of this writing, c/science at lemmy.ml shows the following stats in their sidebar:
Users / day: 12 Users / week: 54 Users / month: 157 Users/ 6 months: 244 Subscribers: 8.27k Posts: 1.23k Comments: 1.29k
As the screenshot of the sidebar in wefwef shows, only the “users / day” stat is correct. Wefwef shows 80 subscribers rather than 8.27k.
Ok, continuing to think out loud. It seems that searching from within my instance with a web browser also shows the 80 subscribers (well, 81 now that I’ve subscribed). So I’m not sure what’s responsible for the error. Nonetheless that’s a huge discrepancy between what the community’s sidebar claims 🤷♂️
I don’t think it’s an error - I think that stat shows only the number of subscribers from your instance, not the total number of subscribers from all instances.
I realised that earlier but I don't like it, it's just not a very useful metric to the end user if it's not total users lol
Yes, particularly if you join a small instance and are unaware of the community search options that capture better statistics. It will give new, naive users the sense that all communities are tiny and inactive.
Exactly. I kept getting the feeling that there are barely any users on Lemmy. This does almost no good. It's ok to show both but not only the instance's numbers.