As it is now, it’s quite inconvenient to not be able to see a community’s actual subscriber count from an instance and instead see how many are subscribed to it from the current instance; makes it hard to judge their activity from a search, and is confusing for new users.
A shared user count directly in lemmy would be very useful.
I would even say that instances should not become so disproportionate big.
It somewhat defeats the point if the whole federation is just two major instances ^^