Organizations need a way other than follower count to measure their engagement, to justify joining the network

[venteto]

This is because for a content consumer, the concepts of following an account and alternately viewing an account by means of a curated User List or Custom Feed are at odds with each other.

It's not always sustainable for a normal user to Follow thousands of accounts. This is why both curated User Lists and Custom Feeds are so handy, to compliment the default List / Feed (aka "Following"). In particular, there is no real need for a content consumer to Follow a plethora of news organizations and journalists, when the consumer can just simply segment these accounts as they wish in one or more User Lists. This way the default "Following" feed and the concept of following in general can be left for other accounts, e.g., perhaps accounts the consumer actually knows personally or would consider more of an actual Friend.

But large organizations apparently have no way of tracking when they have been added to a curated User List, never mind whether other users have Subscribed to that List, in lieu of either the List creator or the List subscribers Following the large organization directly.

This means that if an organization's social media team sees that have relatively few followers, even though their hidden subscriber count may be huge, they will likely deem being on Bluesky an unworthwhile investment of resources. See the following example screenshot of an interaction with a news organization about this matter:

(Screenshot source)

The answer to helping a new organization justify being on Bluesky isn't simply to say that users should just Follow the organization AND also put them into a List/Fedd, or subscribe to someone else's List/Feed. That is redundant. From the consuming user's point of view, User Lists and Custom Feeds are a very useful alternative to Following accounts, they allow the default Following feed to be less of an overwhelming firehose of content, and they allow the default Following feed to explicitly be yet another discreet List, rather than implicitly as it is now.

Can organizations be given a way to see how many lists or feeds they've been added to, as well as how many users have subscribed to those lists and feeds? Can organizations further be given a way to segment these subscriptions to see where they have been used completely as a replacement for direct following, as well as where they also redundantly overlap following?

Is this something that would be implemented at the protocol level?