General Discussion

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founded 2 years ago

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YSK: Subscriber count on communities only show the numbers of users subscribed from your specific instance. The real number might be much larger than you think. (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

22 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/536440

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

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Sure, but the amount of work involved scales differently. To inflate post or comment rankings by a thousand votes, you’d need to create a thousand separate fake upvotes per item, whereas for subscription totals you misreport one number and the effect is permanent. That would make malicious actors harder to detect.