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:

[email protected]

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

[email protected]

  • 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.

([email protected])

([email protected])

([email protected])

([email protected])

([email protected])

([email protected])

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

  • asudoxEnglish
    13•1 year ago

    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.

  • ciferecaNinjo
    10•1 year ago

    I’m not even willing to visit shields·io¹ because it’s a Cloudflare site.

    If so, it might be worth adding the badges to the sidebars.

    I would oppose cluttering the sidebar with 100+ stats. Ideally there would be just 1 line:

    subscribers: 310/30.6K (local/fed)

    If someone wants subscribers per instance detail, that should require some deep clicking around or a dedicated site that keeps track of that.

    BTW, #Lemmy has lemmyverse.net (though I think the subscriber counts are misleading there too). What does #Kbin have for finding communities… anyone know? #askFedi

    footnotes:

    1. note that I raised the dot (.) to (·) so as to discourage visits and so my msg does not add to the search engine rankings of a Cloudflare site.
    • OtterOPEnglish
      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.

    • Thom GrayEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      I didn’t know it was a Cloudflare site, but I was happy to see it’s not running Google’s hardware fingerprinting Ajax scripts that I dislike more than Cloudflare services.

  • VoyagerEnglish
    7•1 year ago

    This is such a useful post.
    As a lemmy newbie, I see that there is a save functionality, but is there a way to tag posts like these so I can reference them in the future?

    • OtterOPEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      Do you mean so that you can search for it in your saved posts more easily? If so I don’t know of any tools for that yet. I’ve been saving things to Pocket when I want something like that.

      Back when I was using Reddit, I set up IFTTT to add my saved posts to a spreedsheet on my google drive. It stopped working a few months ago and I never fixed it. You could try something like that, but it might be easier to just save it with some other service (bookmarks or Pocket type services)

      • VoyagerEnglish
        3•1 year ago

        Thanks for the reply. I am new here, but here to stay. I want to share what I learn and help other folks as well.