The small scale of Lemmy's active user base is never more evident than in the absence of active members in all the sports related communities.
The small scale of Lemmy's active user base is never more evident than in the absence of active members in all the sports related communities.
Its rhe only thing I wish could change about my experience using Lemmy, for more active users in the communities like NFL or NHL and the affiliated team pages of those sports. I haven't had any social media in decades, my main source for sporting news breaks up until 1-2 years ago was Reddit.
I love the small community that makes up Lemmy. As someone just posted, it feels like a small town community. I like the absence of corporate shills and ads and bots.
Back when I switched from Reddit to Lemmmy, I made an effort to upvote and comment on the NFL and Buffalo Bills communities. I eventually gave up because it was like months of posting, voting and commenting but when I would go back to check the communities, everything would still be sitting at like 2 up votes and 0 comment replies or if it was my own post, 1 upvote and 0 comments. For a majority of cases. Every once in a blue moon I would come accross a post where another user voted or commented but it was never more than me and one other user.
I know there is a certain demographic that uses Lemmy that is mostly driven by the required IT prowess needed to set up, use and even understand the federated concept. I also recognize that this demographic is traditionally disinterested in sports. Im not complaining about this or the users who are on Lemmy. Im also not wishing for any changes be made to aggressively expand Lemmy's user base. Its just an impractical wish I have so I could get my sports news from the same source I get all my other news.
I will prolly spend more time this coming year settling on a 2ndary source for sports news from sources similar to sleeper app but it would be so nice if the Lemmy sporting communities blew up so I could keep everything aggregated to one source.
!superbowl@lemmy.world is very active
Lemmy is full of a bunch of older neckbeards, based on my observations. (Inclusive of me)
This is just one narrow view on things, tho.
The Lemmy user base tilts alternative (queer, neurodiverse, subculturally niche, politically leftist beyond the mainstream centre-left and such), whereas sports fandom is coded aggressively mainstream, as part of what it means to pass the normality tests, so there’d be fewer sports fans than in a randomly chosen population. Maybe if there’s an influx of normies here, the sports forums will fill out.
Does anyone else feel like these national leagues have become just as disconnected from reality as any other hyper capitalist enterprise?
I want more hometown sports. I daydream about leagues funded by local communities, starring local talent, with smaller local crowds. Is there anyone else out there who would give much more of a shit if things were a little more close to home, reality-wise? Am I alone?
Guys getting paid literally hundreds of millions to play a sport is unrelatable. A local star making $300k and being a part of the community feels better to me. Seems like we should be able to afford a lot of those for the money we are spending.
I know next to nothing about sports or the business around them, but I know I remember summer nights with cheap hotdogs and minor league ball that seem to have evaporated as the wealthy accumulated. 🤷♂️
I'm not a sports guy, I'm pretty anti-sports actually (I can go on absolutely unhinged TED talks about how the local teams are trying to drain the city for taxes... I want to continue, so feel free to ask but not doing it here.) But I agree with you on the niche hobbies and local flavor.
I still have to use Reddit because there hasn't been a good community for local on Lemmy (yes, I know everyone going "it's user generated" but I'm like 1 of 5 instead of the hundreds still on reddit) and small hobbies in a lot of the crafting world is non-existent on Lemmy.
I don't have an answer on this one, just sucks. It's the trouble of being one of the first ones in the door.
I think it's also just tricky because sports fans tend to want to follow discussion of their team, which splits for example the soccer/football community into hundreds of sub-communities. I used to follow r/panthers (I am a long suffering charlotte home team supporter) but such a community doesn't exist on lemmy. Similarly, you don't really see active individual video game communities on lemmy even though that is more up the alley of the average lemmy user.
Be the change you want to see.
Of your visible posts, 0 of them are in the communities you want to see active. The same goes for your last week or so of comments.Sorry, I looked with an alt account that I did not think had anything blocked, but apparently it does so i did not see your posts in a bills community.I am not a sports fan, but I have been loving watching the PWHL. So much so that I took over modding !womenshockey@reddthat.com I post the score of every game (granted this season there are only 6 teams). I have started to post video highlights, I also am cross posting to !hockey@lemmy.ca however the reception there is decidedly frigid. The community has about doubled in size since I started posting regularly.
Maybe Lemmy has a decent amount of users who are more inclined to nerd stuff like Linux and frisbee? I don't care for sports or cars or other "cool" dude stuff. But I love computers and books and frisbee (which I don't get to throw nearly enough). This just got me thinking. I'm gonna actively try to get some friends together to toss the bee. In my forties. Like we were in our teens. Thanks for inspiring me.
The F1 communities are fairly active but TBF it's mostly because a few people regularly post news articles
Thats because sports are shit, I hope they stay out.
Wow. I didn't realize so many people here were anti sports. Interesting.
I do miss the sports from Reddit so I still go back for that. But I've also decided to try to be the change ... So I've started to post more in the sports communities around here.
It's probably the last thing I still go back to Reddit for. Otherwise Lemmy is my go to.
When the sports centric folk start appearing here in large numbers so will a lot of the garbage that comes with having a non tech userbase.
Everyone’s already hit the high points.
Sports fanbase tends to not be a tech base, which Lemmy primarily is.
Sports are paywalled to hell and back, the userbase here is far more inclined to avoid paywalls and the content behind it.
People dislike the celebrity gossip and stuffed suits surrounding sports.
My own personal disregard for sports leans more towards the dislike of the monied celebrity of the entire genre, the worship of the players, and the pointless obsession and discussion of things like stats that have all the meaning of dowsing rods. But that’s literally just my opinion and obviously plenty of people feel otherwise.
I cannot explain why but small Lemmy communities with unique content do not seem to get favored enough by the algorithm.
One of the most unique Lemmy communities is https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/funhole and it rarely gets featured.
Literally just post everything you find interesting and upvote elsewhere
I wont discount your assessment of the overlap (or lack thereof) between the lemmy demo and sports demo. But I’ll submit to you a factor you, and many others, may not have considered. I fit into both demos but simply lost all interest in keeping up with sports after the pandemic. It just really put into perspective how much they don’t matter to me and I haven’t gotten back into them. I’m curious if this happened in any kind of significant amount. And things haven’t progressed in the world to make getting back into them a big desire. I do still tune in the occasional Stanley Cup playoff game if I happen to come across it with nothing better going on. But I haven’t made sports a primary hobby of mine since 2019 and I don’t think I’m ever going to again. And it used to be my primary hobby. I wasn’t fantasy league and sport book level, but I scheduled life around games and teams and spent lots of time in forums.
ESPNs fees and blackouts exhausted me.
If folks want to gather around and cheer for a sport again, I'm in.
But I'm waiting for a DRM free, non-geo-locked, consistent, reliable Livestream URL. It can be paid, but there probably needs to be free tier to get me interested.
I get that I'm asking a lot, since streaming isn't cheap. But I refuse to believe it's as burdensome as ESPN makes it.
Edit: To be clear - please link me to your favorite non-ESPN sports streaming services, and I'll check them out. Thanks in advance!
Having a small community means you will not attract all the toxic people most of the time.
For me Lemmy feels like s small town ( New Hope, Pennsylvania) with mostly nicer people, while Reddit is a big town (New York) that is well known, but you have a lot more assholes.😅
And honestly, I really enjoy Lemmy for that.🙂
I feel like most of the writing communities are also pretty inactive. I'm not sure why. I liked reading short stories on Reddit, and I don't like looking at memes. I'm not sure whether it's a good thing (because I don't use Lemmy as often that way) or a bad thing.
I guess I could spam them with public-domain stories or reposts or something, but I feel like that's just losing the plot.
On lemmy.ca we have semi-active Hockey pages, especially due to the playoffs, check out !hockey@lemmy.ca, and some of the team pages get occasional posts. The advantage of being a lemmy.ca user is that you will encounter small sports team and small Canadian city page posts more often in local feed.
I think before a Buffalo Bills page takes off we need a relatively active American football page. But sports commentary is not very intriguing to me and feels very formulaic: "Go [team name] Go", "Coach [name] sucks", "Next season we've drafted [name] to our team", etc. etc.
As a Canadian, it's the one place I can go to Canadian communities and not be completely buried by fucking hockey. Even this whole elbows up thing is fucking terrible. I get why. I understand that people have been indoctrinated to this and it's part of their identity here. I don't understand why it has to be absolutley everywhere though.
I thought the exact same thing when i joined. Today while working on my project car I decided to take pictures and make a post sometime over the next few days when I'm done with the task. Hopefully someone sees it and starts discussion and adds content to one of the niche communities here that was actually one of my favorite non toxic subs on shitty ass reddit.
We get to build these communities and it's kind of exciting 🤙
Go Bills, fellow Reddit expat and I definitely miss just getting news posted about the team and Lemmy is nowhere near that level of activity. I’ve ended up just going back to old.Reddit and browsing new here and there - no commenting, not logged in, so it’s not nearly as time consuming as it used to be. Hopefully someday people will use Lemmy for stuff like this!
Try being into less mainstream sports. It's like me and one other guy talking to each other over on !sumo@lemmy.world
I’m not sure that your conclusion follows your premise.
We’re here there’s just not a lot of us yet
Does your sport have a separate meme/shitposting community? If not that may be the missing component. Being able to both talk about the sport and make fun of parts of it are highly engaging.
Formula 1 seems to do decently here on Lemmy with its news and commentary community:
!formula1@lemmy.world with nearly 10k subscribers.
But importantly there's also a place for shitposting and meming for the sport in a separate community:
!formuladank@lemmy.world with 4.1k subscribers.
So for every one subscriber to the main community there is about 1 subscription to the meme community.
Lemmy has sports communities? ;)
The shit in these comments is why Lemmy is doomed to be a minor platform that will inevitably fizzle out.
Seriously people, there are other interests besides Linux and politics. If we bully out other interests from starting communities on Lemmy it'll never grow out of obscurity... some may like that but I'd personally like to see it grow into something that can actually compete with Reddit.
I say this as someone who doesn't like sports at all, but we have these magical things called filters for people like me!
I think I’ve generally been less interested in sports as the pro leagues gatekeep more of their games behind multiple paywalls and less interested in college sports as NIL and conference realignment has killed the traditions and the connection between the students, athletes, and alumni.
If you weren’t already a sports fan, I can’t imagine a much worse time to become one
The small scale of Lemmy's active user base is never more evident than in the absence of active members in all the communities
very important to me.I have communities that I care about that aren't on here too. It's their loss if they don't join the fediverse. If it takes them another few years of eating billionaires dicks to get tired of dickbreath, that's on them.
Easy enough to block the sports communities from your feed if you browse c/all if you dont like them. I say someone set up the sports communities and start posting articles to see if we can get more adoption by the sports folks over here. I dont have the patience for sports but more users is good. Some sports people are obnoxious but some certainly aren't (Bill Bppurr comes to mind) and userbase growth is needed.
I like NHL and MLB. Both my teams are on the other side of the country, though. I cannot watch unless I pay out the wazoo. It ain't worth it. Plus, cable? No thanks. Can't afford it anyways, really. I used to listen to MLB radio at my old job with the AtBat app but they changed the subscription and it got too expensive.
Plus, it's just not accommodating to people like me. I mention liking a team and I get bombarded with questions like "who was the 2nd baseman during 1998?" Or "what's the current batting average for the designated hitter?" Or "who's the coach right now?"
Like I have to prove I'm a 'true fan.' I don't care about that. I see ball go fast, and get hit out the park, it is fun. I see a hockey player toss a puck across the ice, it is fun. I love games but I don't know who the developer is by name. Just the company. Dunno where the best loot chest was in the dungeons of Oblivion/Skyrim/whatever. I just enjoy things the way I enjoy them.
After work, I'd rather spend time reading or playing video games or playing an instrument. Watching ads on TV makes me want to pull my eyes out with a fork. Ads on anything.
Overall... expensive. Ad breaks. And sports fans are not a welcoming bunch. Communities for them are awful, and filled with the kind of men who don't realize it but have every stat memorized and have to belittle everyone about it to prove they're the highlander of sports. The one and only true fan. No thanks.