this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Fediverse

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A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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Your communities might be a lot larger than you think! (lemmy.ca)
submitted 1 year ago by otter@lemmy.ca to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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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:

!fediverse@lemmy.world

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

!canada@lemmy.ca

  • 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.

(!fediverse@lemmy.world)

(!asklemmy@lemmy.ml)

(!games@sh.itjust.works)

(!canada@lemmy.ca)

(!communitypromo@lemmy.ca)

(!houseplants@mander.xyz)

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

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[–] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is this even answerable?

You’d need to know all the servers federated with the parent server, and for all of those, know how many are subscribed.

With the way federation works, I don’t think you can know all the downstream servers your post might flow into.

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yea I wasn't sure if it worked like RSS where you just send the posts out for whoever to catch, or if there's some way for the home instance to count when a new person subscribes

[–] Haui@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago

But this makes the subscriber count kind of pointless imo. It’s kind of important to see how many people really subscribe.

[–] Sigmatics@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

If you take the largest instances and sum the subscribers you're probably 99% of the way there for most communities. There may be outliers, of course

[–] jimmydoreisalefty@lemmus.org 3 points 1 year ago

Great catch, did not know that was the case!

[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago

Thank you for this!

[–] ShellMonkey@lemmy.socdojo.com 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I guess that depends on if the federated users receive content via a push or poll method, and I'm not sure how that's done in Lemmy. If the subscribing user is just requesting content from the home base and pushing their comments/posts up to it then even the home server wouldn't nessesarily know the user count, just the number of instances polling it. From what I've seen trying to clean out communities ( ran a subscriber bot too long and blew up my DB to obnoxious levels ) though is if the home server thinks there is anyone subscribed though it will still look to push content to the remote end, so based on that I would think the home server should have an accurate-ish count of the total users.