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
I don’t think this is entirely true, I think the number of subscribers is just not perfectly synced. My instance doesn’t even allow signups, I just have my single admin account on there, but the communities have quite a few subscribers
https://lemmy.mods4ever.com/communities
Actually, I think that’s for local communities only. Those get synced, my meta community (which is just to have a log for myself) has 34 subscribers, but this community has 1 subscriber.
edit: On my All tab, you can even see which communities I used to be subscribed to but unsubscribed, as they have a subscriber count of 0.
Yeah the home instance of the community is the only one that tracks the full number, other instances only count their own users
Interesting, I assumed it just showed the local numbers. What do you see when looking at !canada@lemmy.ca for example?
You just have to view it on the community’s home instance. From my instance it says 36, but from
https://lemmy.ca/c/canada
It says 6.03k
The badges are a pretty good idea though
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !canada@lemmy.ca
For me, it shows 1 subscriber, 1.4k users per month.
It seems to be entirely dependent on the instance.