There does seem to be a lot of pushback around bots recently. It might be worth reaching out to discuss with a wider audience eg. !bots@lemmy.world or similar

Have you considered doing a top community of the week/month/year thing? You could reach out to community mods and alert them they’ve won “Top Community of X period based on <Growth>”. Keep a pinned post detailing current “winners”. It would help advertise this community, and it would encourage other communities to be more competitive/pro-active in appealing to new users.

That’s how doubt works.

1. There’s something you know and you experience something which challenges that knowledge.
2. Now you only believe this thing, less sure in your knowledge so you reach out to others who are more knowledgeable on the topic.
3. Post answer your belief has either returned to fact or you’ve learned something new, abandoned a false belief and grown as a person.

Nothing wrong with reaching out.

I think splitting the post into sections dedicated to specific metrics might help. You could keep WIP metrics live but as different sections. For example…

Top N By…

Growth Percentage: <this would be your current metric> … … …

Absolute Number of New Subscribers: <eg. trendingcommunites +5000 new subscribers> … … …

Trending Formula (WIP) (Link to post detailing formula): <this is the formula talked about in a different comment> … … …

Etc.

I think that grabbing the easy metrics and offering them up initially will be more beneficial to growing your own subscriber count than trying to work out a clever way to do just the one thing.

Love the idea though, I’ve posted about this community in a couple places and I’m thrilled to see that it’s taking off a bit. Great job!