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).
That's another thing. People need to stop recommending the massive servers and recommend smaller ones like vlemmy.net, lemmy.one or lemm.ee instead, at lest until lemmy'soptimized for user counts of this scale. Those servers have also been upgraded for the surge of users after all, and everything's connected anyway.
In fact, I think lemmy clients should go as far as to assign new users randomly to good general servers like these upon registration so they don't even have to know about instances; would make the onboarding much better
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!
Yeah this feels like a big flaw in the systemyeah it's cool it's all communal, but being split is weird
Casual users will just want a 'subscribe' like you do on Reddit. They're not going to care about servers and instances and 3 different variations of the same community on different lemmys, that's just a hurdle.
I know this because nobody in my friend group has made the jump because it's too confusing. I'm the usual tech-guy early adopter in the group but most of this has gone over my head too.