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
This can be easily fixed tbh. You just need to get the sub count directly from the instance that the community resides in via API. Because that instance has all the subs while the other instances only have their part of local subs.