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.
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.
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.
Yeah, the whole “anti-sports” thing always seemed like overcompensation for something? Like if you don’t like sports (I don’t, for the most part), then just don’t watch them.
It’s strange when people get like actively hostile about the existence of sports.
And all I want is to never see sports related communities. So I guess I win there…
Unfortunately I also never want to see anything that mentions anime or manga and in that department it’s serious whackamole for me.
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!
The shit in these comments is why Lemmy is doomed to be a minor platform that will inevitably fizzle out.
Why will it fizzle out? It doesn’t have to be for everything. People have places to discuss sports already, and I guess they’re happy with them.
Also, I know I’m not alone in saying that I prefer it stay a “minor platform.”
They are an oracle and decide futures
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.
That’s just ignorant. There are plenty of people in those demographics you listed who are very active fantasy football and fantasy sports in general fans.
Hey if you want to join me on !fantasyfootball@lemmy.world this season. The few of us that contribute would love it.
Fuck yeah!
You’re the only ignoramus here.
Watching idiots bash their heads against each other or chase after a ball is what a dog would do.
Jesus christ, im sorry that I brought up fucking sports. I had no idea it would piss so many people off. Its not like I did it in a tech focused community. I have befriended other sports fans from all walks of life, so to say “x,y,z people dont like sports” to me is ignorant as fuck. Sorry I triggered you and I promise I will never make another comment or post regarding anything sports related ever again.
You realize that athletes are exceptionally intelligent in different ways than people pecking at a keyboard all day, right?
Athletes are not dumb. Take a look at a football playbook. You going to remember all of that, be able to recall it, and then also know all the audible changes to a play that you have to make? Are you able to make split second decisions for 60 minutes while wearing knives on your feet like a hockey player? Do you have the hand eye coordination to hit a 94 mile per hour fast ball, but know that the pitcher you’re facing also has a 35% chance to throw an 82 mph sinker?
Acting like you have one kind of intelligence and shitting on people who have different kinds of intelligence just makes you look like you’re jealous.
Take a look at a football playbook. You going to remember all of that, be able to recall it, and then also know all the audible changes to a play that you have to make?
Bet you every penny you ever made that I could do it in one quarter of the time that most of the pros do it. There’s a reason they have the training season.
Try being into less mainstream sports. It’s like me and one other guy talking to each other over on !sumo@lemmy.world
!superbowl@lemmy.world is very active
When are the owls gonna play sportsball?
Hoot hoot, hike!
Hmmmmmm is it tho, WHO would be active there and WHO would only wanna talk about one game once a year? Lol im just assuming its a community dedicated to owls.
It’s pretty active with Superb Owls, just like you’d expect!
What’s this one-time sports game you’re talkin’ about?
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.
I like to pretend that all the Lemmy communities have a unique participants but in really it is just the same people on the same few communities.
I also feel like we need some Lemmy specific lingo. Reddit has subs I wonder what Lemmy has. Communities is just to long to type out.
People refer to them as coms or comms.
Commies! Oh, wait.
Theres lots of those here.
Lemmy moment
what about subs? lemmy subs
The Philadelphia ones identify as hoagies.
Connecticut will identify as grinders
Is there a sub for subs on grinder?
I’m actually down to call them that
There’s a comm on lemmynsfw, if you’re interested in subs.
Did y’all think I meant the sexy kind of subs?
Intentional misunderstanding for comedic purposes. “Sub” doesn’t have meaning on Lemmy, any more than it would on an old school phpBB forum. It’s a reddit naming convention.
Ah, i see
Does a kind of underground system like Lemmy appeal to sports fans?
I think so yes where you can find out real, not paid for news
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.
Did you see that ludicrous display last night?
(The original site, vectorbelly, is not loading for me, but fortunately I found this backup)
I did not. What’d I miss?
These are all nerds who don’t follow sportball most likely. They are quoting the TV show “The IT Crowd” where the main characters pretend to know about sports.
You know, Lemmy is powered by the users. The sports community will never grow if no one is here to grow it. Most people that jumped ship to build and grow Lemmy are techies, and likely not interested in sports all that much.
You just planted the seed, will you also be a watering can?
This is so dismissive.
I spent a full year posting to !leagueoflegends@lemmy.world and interaction there is still minimal to dead.
It’s not really the starting of communities that needs help. We need more people to be the second and third person to join and help communities that someone else is trying to start.
This is so dismissive
It’s all the complaint deserves
We need more people to be the second and third person to join and help communities that someone else is trying to start
Sounds like you need to let your sports-liking associates elsewhere know about the platform to help with your problem, rather than whinge that the already existing userbase doesn’t like what you do
This 100%, it’s even harder when someone puts a posting bot in a sub and expects people to show up. The best communities started by someone creating a sub and posting things they found interesting. Treating it like a personal link archive. Then people would add to the discussion after finding you. If you are posting for a few weeks and then just gives up. It just makes the problem worse. Since now people have to sift through a bunch of dead communities on multiple instances all named the same.
It has to be built organically it’s like people with video channels on YouTube or peer tube. Making your first video and if it doesn’t do well they quit. Most successful creators made tons of videos before they took off. They kept at it because they were making the videos for themselves for just the sake of self expression as their first priority and the views will come.
This is kind of a problem in the NFL Community actually. There’s one user, I don’t know if it’s a bot or not, who just shotguns like 10 to 15 post at a time. It washes out any discussion in the entire community.
I’ve noticed a couple of users doing this in the Music community recently, as well.
If it’s a bot, fuck the owner. If it’s a real person, chill the fuck out dude. Don’t bust a nut so quickly, it’ll be more fun that way I swear.
Yep people like that that use bots or worse AI to auto post think they are helping but are just bring the dead internet theory to reality.
We are in at the ground level of Lemmy. A lot of people like OP are passive consumers, but now is the time to step up, get out of your comfort zone and start building the communities you want to see. You might have to hustle a little bit
If you do start up a community you can link it like this:
Here’s a totally random community about strength and hypertrophy training for example
We are in at the ground level of Lemmy. A lot of people like OP are passive consumers
For real? Im replying to almost every comment I get a notification, I made this post, I’ve commented on NFL posts among other comments in non-sports comms. How you guna just blindly call me a passive consumer lol? Not hating just couldn’t believe you coulld draw that conclusion while I felt I was borderline spamming the thread with replies hahah 🍻cheers tho, to your commitment to motivating any and all users to be more active.🍻
Gotta give props to active participation, upvotes, comments are helping too, you’re right. I was just focussed on community building, it might not be as fun but it’s important also
Nah, I’m just gonna do what I’m doing. Commenting on stuff I like or am interested in and that’s it. I’m way too anti-social to do something like building a community.
It does feel like a small town. Most small towns don’t have pro sports teams, though.
Oh shit this reminds me of a discussion I had on here a while ago when I found out there are only 40,000 daily active users on average and realizing that it was less than half of th capacity of highmark stadium. So yeah, Lemmy does have that small town vibe but its more of a small geographic community like, for example, New England or Western New York. I can go to any Bills game with 80,000 other fans and I can take a piss or grab a beer without running into someone I know. Its exactly the same with Lemmy too.
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
