Ignore the user counts you see. That's only users on your local instance that are subbed to it, not all.
Your home instance may not be aware of all communities because reasons.
Take a look at lemmyverse.net
Also, communities here just don't have that many users.
And AFAIK the number of subscribers only refers to your instance so there might be more from other instances.
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
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.
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
They're completely separate. I've heard that they're working on ways to fix this issue, though.
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
Besides already mentioned methods there's also Lemmy Community-Browser.
It has a search bar and ability to toggle specific instances in case you want to avoid some of them. A bit simpler version of Lemmy Explorer mentioned by @DogMuffins.
sub.rehab shows where Reddit communities went during the blackout. A lot of those communities are still going pretty strong. You can filter its list down to just lemmy and kbin instances.
There's !findacommunity@lemmy.ml and !FindAKbin@kbin.social
Can you tell me how the ! Commands work? Where do I put them? Search? I am on kbin if it matters.
Basically you just write out !(community/magazine name)@(instance address) and it should automatically format when you post.
For example, this place would be !NoStupidQuestions@lemmy.world but it should work with Lemmy or Kbin just fine.
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.
The one I can see has 80, but fyi these counts are buggy anyway. So don't rely on them.
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
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