cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/5674368
The number of subscribers listed in the sidebar is only the number of users from YOUR instance that are subscribed. This might make you feel like a community is ‘small’ or ‘dead’ when it actually isn’t.
I also started to forget this till I was playing with the shields.io badges earlier and the numbers didn’t match up.
Here are some examples:
- My instance will see 310 subscribers
- This instance will see 22.6K subscribers
- My instance will see 6.03K subscribers
- This instance will see 1.49K subscribers
Now my question is, what’s an accurate way to see the total number of subscribers? Is it in the home instance for a particular community?
If so, it might be worth adding the badges to the sidebars.
To do this quickly, go to https://shields.io/badges/lemmy and enter:
myCommunity@example.com
for communitylemmy
for logoTotal Subscribers
for label- modify the colors and style as you like
You can also modify the community and instance here and paste it in:
![](https://img.shields.io/lemmy/fediverse%40lemmy.world?logo=lemmy&label=Total%20Subscribers)
swap the fediverse%40lemmy.world
portion
Yea I wasn’t sure if it worked like RSS where you just send the posts out for whoever to catch, or if there’s some way for the home instance to count when a new person subscribes
But this makes the subscriber count kind of pointless imo. It’s kind of important to see how many people really subscribe.