Your communities might be a lot larger than you think!

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])

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&amp;label=Total%20Subscribers)

swap the fediverse%40lemmy.world portion