I’m fairly new to fediverse/instances, but my understanding that these Instances are federated with each other, so they can show the same posts/communities (depending on their respective filters).
So, why does searching for communities show different results, and even show different subscriber counts for one that do appear across all results?
Is this a case of the servers just needing to sync with each other?
Every server does not contain a record of everything that’s on every other server. That would be way too much, and essentially mean that every server would have to download the entire fediverse, that’s not how it works.
Each server only knows about what’s directly on itself, and what at least one user has interacted with.
Even if my server is federated with yours, my server wont sync posts from a community your server has, until at least one user on my server has subscribed to that community.
This way, each server only needs to contain stuff that the users on it actually want.
As for the subcount, each server is showing how many users on it has subbed, not the global count. For that, you need to go to the host instance.
I don’t think the host instance has a global count, even there they only have data on local users.
Then how does [email protected] have 9.3k subs when viewed from sopuli?
Sopuli only hosts 3.7k accounts.
You’re right, the community as seen on the home instance has all subscribers.