This seriously needs to implemented in lemmy already. Not being able to see the true member count/activity of all communities is a massive blow to discoverability and very anti-ux, and likely the biggest hurdle for newcomers.
Yep, would be nice. No one expected the massive influx of users, though. This suddenly changed from something extremely niche to something a lot of users at least know about.
IMO the biggest hurdle for newcomers is that everyone is going to lemmy.world and then it's slow and everything and they think Lemmy is slow because they don't understand how federation works (which is understandable, it's the first time they're seeing something like that).
Don't click the title, click the text starting wirh ! (like !linux@lemmy.ml) and paste it into search on lemmy.world. It will find that community and you can then click it and join.
Edit: If others are reading this, you can click the home button and setup your home instance, that way the links will correctly go to your instance and the whole process is much better!
This is the best equivalent on lemmy.world, but just in case you don’t know this about the Fediverse yet, you don’t need a community to be on your home instance to subscribe to it. If you find any community that you like on any other instance, you are able to subscribe by searching for that community from your home instance.
Just wanted to let you know that you aren’t limited to the communities you see on the lemmy.world community page, or ones linked in c/newcommunities.