Why are community subscriber counts different when watched from different instances?
I created two accounts on two different instances and all the communities I see have different subscriber counts depending from which account I look. Why does that happen and how can I see the real subscriber count?
If you look at C from within B, the subscriber count will give you the number of subscribers from B and will ignore the ones from other instances.
It's always been my belief that when viewing a community on the community's home server, you see the global subscriber count including both subscribers on that instance and federated subscribers. That count is always bigger than the count on any subscribing instance, which only makes sense if the community's instance counts federated subscribers.
I've suggested one correction below, but I'm not sure this is right, either.
I have an instance with just me, yet I see thousands of subscribers. I think what is happening is the count is the number of users who have federated info on the instance. (This is an educated guess, I have not investigated the code).
The theory is it's counting users in your local DB that have comments/likes/posts in the instance's local version of the federated community.
In this case, the accurate count of users is the originating instance.