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.
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
We’re here there’s just not a lot of us yet
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 🤙
I would be interested in NHL stuff but I don’t even consume that much NHL content. If somebody actively posts in NHL and other hockey related sub lemmy communities then I’ll join and try to engage as much as I can.
I get so pissed when I hear stories of the shit the nhl tries out in hopes of growing their fan base when all they need to do is strike a deal with a streaming platform that will allow local markets watch their local team. Ever since I got rid of cable, fuck maybe a decade now, I have all but gave up watching hockey. Yeah ill watch playoffs and yeah I know I can pirate a live stream for each game but for 82 games a year its asking a lot to search for a good streaming source.
We like sports and we don’t care who knows.
Sports are dumb anyway!
So original and edgy! To each their own🍻
I should have used /s, just joshin
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 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.
Wait - writing communities on Lemmy?
This is exactly how I feel across all lemmy communities. Back in my reddit days id find myself writing out entire comments in full, only to delete them before submitting just to avoid a subsequent flood of replies. On lemmy I find myself leaving more and more comments even on shit I barely care about just hoping to drive more user discussions.im not complaining. I genuinely love lemmy and hated reddit, but I cant help feeling like im spaming posts with my comments.
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.
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 like the absence of corporate shills and ads.” Also, why doesn’t anyone talk about sports teams owned by billionaires and corporations?
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!
Fuck yeah, Go Bills!
Go Bills. I started on the twobillsdrive board until that went to shit. Migrated to the bills subreddit after that. Would be nice to have that here.
One thing to do is link people on reddit to lemmy. That’s how I found out about this place. Most people have no idea it exists
I personally cant watch NFL after being a lifelong fan. Seems like the games are being manipulated. Seems a little glitchy with some weird calls being made these days. Became unwatchable for me but …Go Ravens !!!
Go Bills! Well now that youre here, it makes 3 of us! According to the laws of nature that officially makes us a community of Bills fans instead of a couple of Bills fans😂
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).
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 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.
