title: Laravel Broadcast Channels - check connections
body: <p>I can't find this in the docs or by searching, maybe someone has some tips. I'm trying to check how many connections are on a presence channel on the backend.</p>
  
  <p>I can check fine on the front-end with Echo like so:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Echo.join('chat')
      .here((users) =&gt; {
          // users.length is the proper count of connections
      })
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But is there a way I can get that same number of connections, but in the backend code somewhere within Laravel?</p>