[Feature]: integrate with browse.feddit.de for community subscriber counts

[Hikiru]

Check for open issues

• I have verified that another issue for this is not open, or it has been closed and has not been properly implemented.

What is the feature that you would like to have added?

Currently subscriber counts aren’t federated (big oversight in my opinion) which can make large communities look a lot smaller. For example, ![email protected] has over 11,000 total subscribers according to browse.feddit.de, but when viewed from Memmy from a sh.itjust.works account it only has around 350. A way for Memmy to mitigate this is to use browse.feddit.de to display subscriber counts.

Solution

Fetch subscriber counts from browse.feddit.de with a toggle to only show local subscriber counts (how it is now). Use the local subscriber count as a fallback in case browse.feddit.de doesn’t have a community for some reason or it goes down.

Alternatives

The only other alternative I can think of would be to try to get the Lemmy devs to add subscriber count federation. I’m pretty sure I opened my own issue about this a while ago though, and never got a response

[sgriff96]

Do they have an API to integrate with?

[Hikiru]

I couldn't find a github for browse.feddit.de, but I found something similar (lemmyverse.net) with this issue open. https://data.lemmyverse.net/ might have what you need. I'm not a developer so I couldn't tell you

[Hikiru]

Any update on this? Does the link I gave have the data needed for this?

[sgriff96]

No update, it's pretty low priority so will let you know if there are any issues when we eventually get to it

[gkasdorf]

Yea, we will explore this and see, but I'd say it would be at least another week or so before it happens @Hikiru. I do like the idea though, because I've seen a lot of issues with counts. Probably will do this at the same time as integrating the better search API (if possible).

[Hikiru]

I expected at least a week for something like this. Search and subscriber counts are the biggest issues with lemmy I have rn, I hope the lemmy devs work on it so third party devs don’t have to.

[tgxn]

Howdy, just a comment as I'm going to close the issue on my side. (I should probably add that I made/run lemmyverse.net)

What @Hikiru is possible when this gets deployed in the next ~4 hours
tgxn/lemmy-explorer#155

https://data.lemmyverse.net/data/community-metrics/lemmy.ml/afl.meta.json

You could also just hit the instance directly with:
GET https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/community?name=abruptchaos

Searching is another story, you could offer a way to download and cache the chunked community data, as discussed here:
thunder-app/thunder#508 (comment)

If you need data in another shape or want additional metrics to be included, I can do that too, just open another issue with me :D