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.comfor communitylemmyfor logoTotal Subscribersfor label- modify the colors and style as you like
You can also modify the community and instance here and paste it in:
swap the fediverse%40lemmy.world portion
Ah, you mean remote communities. To me (and those on small instances) surely is easier to understand, but I can see why people on a larger instance might not get it.