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.
Actually you want to join a medium size to larger community that has some history and is aligned with your interests and geography. This makes content discovery a lot easier. At least medium size and been around awhile suggests too that the admins might know what they are doing and keep it around awhile longer.
Just saying size and history do have value.