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.
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.
If you scroll just a little pass the surface level of their account you can see that OP has posted a dozen times in the Bills community.
I likely have that community blocked. I looked with an alt account that I did not think had anything blocked. Oops.
I hope you only spent the time scolling posts cuz that seems like a long way to go to verify what I explained in my post if you scrolled thru all the comments I post looking for the cast time I posted/commented in NFL or Bills communities lol. I know its been a long time cuz if memory serves it would’ve been in last years off season.
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.
Thats because sports are shit, I hope they stay out.
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.
So this is the type of discussion I was hoping for. I honestly didn’t even mean to trigger so many people by bringing up sports when the whole showerthought started cuz I missed my local team’s subreddit.
I can go on absolutely unhinged TED talks about how the local teams are trying to drain the city for taxes…
Don’t even get me started, we are in the same paddle boat when it comes to the ownership and the league’s use of tax payer dollars. The fucking Bills just set some sort of record I think for the new stadium they built by the belligerently small amount of money the owners are going to be contributing. The fuckin thing is costing billions and its just about entirely funded by 2 channels from the same source, the people of our our community. 1 channel is thru taxes and the other is thru some PPE shit where if you want to buy season tickets you need to give them like $40,000 as a one time fee into of the season ticket cost and also commit to like 10 seasons to even be able to buy a season ticket.
I know your reply will be “then why are you a fan still” so ill bashfully explain why in one word, community. The WNY community is my favorite part of the greater Buffalo/Niagara region and being apart of Billsmafia is such a huge part of it. We’ve never been a champion, until 5 years ago there were no bandwagons of fans looking to become Bills fans, its something you are just born into here. We put up with 8 ft snow storms, 17 years of missing the playoffs, losing 4 super bowls in a row, Damar Hamlin going into a freak occurrence of cardiac arrest and needing 10 mins of CPR to survive, and thats just the big stuff. At the end of the day tho, it forms a bond in the community like I’ve never seen anywhere else. When Josh’s Allen’s grandmother died, Billsmafia raised millions of dollars for his charity which came in $17 increments (his jersey number), now today there is an entire wing at Oshea’s Children’s Hospital dedicated to his grandmother’s name all funded by fans and member of the community. When we got dumped on with 6 ft of snow in 2 days, Bills players drover around house to house in skidsters plowing out people’s driveways. When Andy Dalton beat the Ravens against all odds and made it so the Bills would go to the playoffs breaking a 17 year long drought, Andy isnt even a Buffall Bills player he plays for Cincinnati but that didn’t stop Billsmafia from raising hundreds of thousands if not over a million dollars for Andy’s charity.
The idiots who own teams and run the league can get fucked, ill never argue against that but the men and women within each and every organization who have their boots on the ground, they are all amazing humans busting their ass off to make theirs and our community the best they possibly can.
Oh I get it completely. There’s a bunch of subreddits I miss, my industry I work in which is very niche, leatherworking, heck even the motorcycle community in Lemmy is… lacking.
On the other part you brought in… OH BOY! Unhinged TED talk time.
So I live relatively close to the Royals and the Chiefs stadiums. John Sherman, gas magnate, the owner of the Royals decided he wanted to move the stadium to downtown, where things have been picking up. Specifically he wanted it in the Crossroads where there’s a lot of local community shops and everything, because he wanted it near Power and Light district where there’s bars and the like which… oh right, he owns a lot of. Troubles came up that the stadium proposals took foooooooorever to even come up, looked like it was drawn on a napkin instead of anything serious, and wanted a tax levy to be put on the city to continue one that still hasn’t been paid off for the last time the two stadiums were built. The whole time saying “Look how the stadiums bring business in!”… the area around the two stadiums have managed to keep a Denny’s and a Taco Bell alive, the big resort hotel couldn’t even survive. Yea… real great for business.
Another trouble is… as I say, I am one of those who actively detests sports… I wish I could find the post, there’s an old Reddit post describing what not liking sports was like and used archeology in how it invades everything around you so it’s easy to go from “I couldn’t care less” to “Okay, I hate this thing now. It is insufferable.” I say all that to say, just paying any attention to the news I knew at the time the Royals was the second worst team in the MLB, they were that bad. So they knew they couldn’t get this move off the ground so they went to the Chiefs who was the most recent superbowl winner which of course was happy to get money their way, and the ad campaign went out. And despite the Royals/Sherman being the push on getting this going, it was all Chiefs all the time. I literally even got a flier in my mail “The liberals are trying to take away our teams!” paid for by the team push, so yay politics even drug in. The whole time threatening “Well if you don’t vote it in, we’ll move. Maybe to Kansas (right over the border) or hey, even Tennessee.” Thing is, the state remembers St. Louis on the other side had the rams, built them a stadium and whoopsiedoodle they packed up and moved to California leaving a city with a stadium and fuck all to do with it.
So we’ve got all sorts of issue in state and local level, but holy fuck all the political pressure since the voters turned down the tax is “How can we keep these teams in Missouri!” And it’s funny, I said I’d be more okay paying for it if we got ANYTHING out of it… I don’t mind paying taxes to keep our zoo going and it’s nice I get a hefty discount when I go, but the Royals and Chiefs are giving a nice hearty “go fuck yourself” for us paying taxes so the billionaires have their teams.
On to the “Why are you a fan?” question you brought up. I don’t question it… but I’ve never understood it. I grew up in Arkansas that never had a pro team so college sports was big… I got to hear the “calling the hogs” my entire life and never comprehended the why. Probably because dad was not a sports guy and had the opinion “Why do I want to watch people play a game?” even though he played in high school and I’ve been pretty much the same. I get the community stuff, and that’s fantastic. I’ve just found a community outside of sports so it doesn’t resound to me. The reason I’ve become so against sports beyond it’s completely impossible to ignore it it’s so inundated in culture, is the sheer amount of money that goes into it in all levels. High school, if you’re one of the “football” schools, your school only has 3-4 sports, all the big stadium ticket getting team sports, the smaller less prestigious schools get more sports like wrestling and the like… guess which situation I ended up in? And watching schools dump money into the sports above all other things like theater, labs, etc. “But it brings in money for the school.” Cool cool… so why are we getting asked for a tax levy so the school can build yet another stadium? Repeat this for the college level so the “Hogs can have a proper place to play!” and now the city with pro teams level. And I hear the ticket prices and think I wouldn’t pay those prices to see my favorite band… and again, those ticket prices and yet we have to pay for their shit?
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
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 🤙
G O
C H I E F S !
Awwwwww fuck you and the double cheeseburger Andy rode in on. Lol🍻
Dammit, not like that!
Instantly dislike this idea…
She/He wanted more sports interaction!
Lemmy has sports communities? ;)
pro sports are about as normie of an activity as you can get… it’ll be a while before anything beyond futbol ends up here
HAHA SPORTSBALL GUYS.
! DAE HANDEGG???1PLEASE CLAP
Did you have a stroke?
You certainly seem like you’ve had a few brain clots.
My bad, i dont understand a lick of what his comment even says but it must make sense if everyone else can understand it if its obvious enough to throw insults as a reply.
@socsa@piefed.social was making fun of (at least, I think they’re making fun of…it could be a pretty extreme Poe’s Law case) people who vehemently hate sport. “Sportsball” is a word such people use to belittle sport. “DAE handegg” references (1) the “DAE [x]” meme, where someone makes fun of a community hivemind by saying “does anyone else like [thing the community is well-known for liking]”, and (2) the term “handegg”, used by fans of soccer to refer to other types of football, because of a misunderstanding of what “ball” means (they think it requires a spherical object) and why football is called football (they think it’s because you kick the ball exclusively with your feet). People who unironically say “handegg” also seem to have never looked at either an egg or a non-soccer football.
Ok i can see it now. I definitely never saw this meme format before or if I did I prolly assumed stroke or but dial comment post so thank you.
Yeah but did you try Linux
I was gonna make the sportsball comment and you crushed my spirit.
As a sports fan (NHL, NFL, NBA, ATP) I feel lucky to have a bunch of sports fan coworkers. We talk sports and joke around at work all day.
I do wish the sports communities on lemmy were more active. It seems like lemmy’s left-wing community does not have very many sports fans.
Leftists usually love sports for supporting other cultures but hate commercial teams and sponsorhips. Enes Kanter was banned from NBA for talking about human rights as example.
Also most sports fans on lemmy are into computers too since it takes some messing around to setup so that might be why those communities are always big.
I am heavily into Atli Cirit and archery, martial arts look fun to watch too. But why would I search for those communities when I know there is a huge programming community that I can simply join.
It’s just been my experience that a lot of athletes and a lot of sports fans tend to be more right wing and that a lot of leftists don’t like sports at all, even when there are no pro teams involved (pickup leagues etc).
Personally I have no love for sports but my partner does we are both quite far left so I don’t think that really has anything to do with it.
and that a lot of leftists don’t like sports at all
Is that your experience per se, or have most of the leftists you’ve seen been nerds, and you’re just noticing the much more well-documented trend of nerds disliking sport?
Personally I happen to be the kind of nerd who loves sport. My favourites are triathlon (and its constituent sports) and HEMA, but I also like professional spectator sports cricket and rugby league.
HEMA’s a bit of an odd one since it tends to attract nerds more than people who are fans of more traditional sports. When I skip training to watch a big game of league, I definitely get light-hearted but at least somewhat sincere “sportsball” comments from regulars who like doing HEMA but aren’t interested in other “normal” sports. But my other sporting interests are far more conventional. This, while being a software engineer by trade, and also having more nerdy hobbies like D&D (actually, even nerdier: I play Pathfinder these days), real-time strategy games, and…well, being on Lemmy.
also having more nerdy hobbies like D&D (actually, even nerdier: I play Pathfinder these days
pffffffffffffffft, those aren’t even nerdy. Those are like bringing kraft cheddar to a fancy cheese party and saying you’re a connoisseur. Let me know when you want to break out the real nerd braggadocio and start in on the fan-made white wolf spinoffs, or the burning wheel good times.
;)
fan-made white wolf spinoffs
Damn. I did buy a copy of V5 back before the pandemic because someone was going to start up a game that I was pretty excited to be in. Unfortunately that went by the wayside and I’ve so far never gotten to play any World of Darkness games.
The nichest RPG I’ve played was probably “End of the World”, where the premise is you play as yourself, arriving at your regular RPG night, and just as you get started, the apocalypse starts. Awesome premise. Fucking terrible mechanics. Do not recommend that system.
Actually, that’s not quite true. I did once play a home-made system someone else at my table created. But it wasn’t particularly inspired in my opinion, and didn’t do anything very interesting you couldn’t do with a little tweaking of PbtA.
d20 fantasy is my main thing that I keep returning to, but I’ve had plenty of other RPG experience ;)
Alright, I give you the nerd credit. I’m just depressed because I found out there was a group starting a game in my theater troupe, but they’d capped it at 5 and I was too late. I’d even take D&D right now.
The end of the world sounds fun. I’d bet it would be a blast to throw that wrench in ‘session zero’ of a fate game (which is my personal favorite, even the prometheus and werewolf games don’t match up).
The end of the world sounds fun
Yeah the premise of it really is. Our starting inventories were literally whatever we brought with us, plus whatever happens to be in the host’s house. The conceit we went with was that the person who’s gonna be GM is just “running late” when the apocalypse starts. It was just let down by some disappointing character stat generation methods and mechanics that weren’t very good.
I did qualify my entire comment with:
It’s just been my experience that…
So yes. And most of the nerds I’ve met lean right, not left. The leftists I’ve met tended to study the Arts (English, sociology, history, etc) whereas the right wing types all studied math, engineering, computer science.
I do know a pair of right-leaning philosophy students though they claim to feel like outliers in a program that’s an outlier (the other way) at a school that’s mostly STEM programs.
The leftists I’ve met tended to study the Arts (English, sociology, history, etc) whereas the right wing types all studied math, engineering, computer science
Sure, maybe. I’ll point out that there’s a known statistical trend of more highly-educated people being more left-leaning, but I’ll leave that discussion there, because it’s not actually the point.
I didn’t actually say anything about nerds being leftists. I said that nerds are anti-sport. And that Lemmy is made up of nerds. Both of which, I hope, are not controversial statements. Not that Lemmy is made up of a representative cross-sample of nerds, but that of the users who are on Lemmy, most are nerds. My conjecture is that the reason you see a dislike for sport on Lemmy is not because Lemmings are left-wing, but because they’re nerds. And that if you were to control for political belief, Lemmy would still have a stronger anti-sport bias than the general public. While if you controlled for “nerdiness”, Lemmy’s anti-sport bias would be relatively weaker. Not an easy experiment to perform in practice, unfortunately.
I think even if you exclude all nerds, you’ll find that sports fans lean right. Nerds, left or right, tend to be anti-sport, though that’s basically by definition (a nerd being a person whose hobbies skew intellectual rather than physical).
That’s not the only way to define a nerd however. Another definition I’ve heard is based on the level of obsessiveness a person has with their hobby. In that world I would consider most of the biggest sports fans to be nerds. Think about how much time they spend looking at stats, talking about strategies, trades, drafts, listening to radio and podcasts, etc. All of that is very much in common with how video game nerds engage with their interest.
I consider myself a nerd who loves both sports and video games (RPGs, Roguelikes, fighting games, RTS). However unlike many sports fans and athletes, I’m not religious or superstitious. I think that latter group correlates with being right-wing (perhaps even more so than education).
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.
Well it’s not much of an algorithm, it’s mostly about votes or comments depending on your selected filter. If you want niche things you need to subscribe to communities and engage with it.
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
Lemmy is also primarily used by super nerds who don’t care about sportsball. Not enough normies here compared to Reddit.
Which is what I find odd because every gamer and nerd I know is also interested in sports or at the very least interested in fantasy sports leagues. Might just be my area tho where the whole community and all walks of life get together to watch the Bills and Sabres play.
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.🙂
