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:

!fediverse@lemmy.world

  • My instance will see 310 subscribers
  • This instance will see 22.6K subscribers

!canada@lemmy.ca

  • 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.

(!fediverse@lemmy.world)

(!asklemmy@lemmy.ml)

(!games@sh.itjust.works)

(!canada@lemmy.ca)

(!communitypromo@lemmy.ca)

(!houseplants@mander.xyz)

To do this quickly, go to https://shields.io/badges/lemmy and enter:

  • myCommunity@example.com for community
  • lemmy for logo
  • Total 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

  • Otter@lemmy.caOPEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    That’s fair, I think it’s only really reasonable to add the one badge for the total subscribers. It would act as a workaround until we can get something like subscribers: 310/30.6K (local/fed). If there’s some reason why Lemmy can’t show the true subscriber count, then this should work in the long run too.

    I was poking around with lemmyverse.net, and I think they might be pulling the subscriber for each community from the home instance for each. According to the other commenters, the count on the home instance should be the accurate count, so lemmyverse.net might be accurate (in which case why doesn’t Lemmy show that info by default…).

    For Kbin, you can use the same site: https://lemmyverse.net/kbin/magazines?order=followers Although I heard that there are some issues with the data for the Kbin sites, because of API issues of some kind?

    As for the cloudflare site, I didn’t know that. If you wanted to use the badge, you should be able to edit the codeblock above and make a new link without opening the site. It would still be pulling images from their site, you just wouldn’t be opening the the site yourself. Otherwise, their repo is here: https://github.com/badges/shields, and there may be other sites that do something similar.