I still believe that getting access to sports news and commentary would be one of the sure-fire ways to get more people in the Fediverse. But even after all these years, Reddit, Twitter and Instagram obviously completely dominate the space.
In the US, the NFL is starting in a couple of weeks and the NBA will come back in October. There is also the European Football (Soccer) leagues which started this month, so the thought came to mind again: what could we have that could make the conversation around professional sports more interesting…
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Specific apps or sites that act as a multi-platform client, to let you follow short clips from Loops, or posts from specific communities or athletes?
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Real time scores and match threader bots?
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A (local, user-controlled) recommendation algorithm to manage different news sources?
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Integration with fantasy leagues?
Maybe I am barking at the wrong tree and/or the majority of people here do not care about it enough, but I would like to hear some ideas to see if there is anything we could do.
Things have gotten better over time, especially with bridges. There are a few Bluesky users who talk about sports, and there’s also sportsbots.xyz which mirrors sports-related X accounts to the Fediverse. Also, @NBA@lemmy.world is a pretty poppin’ Lemmy community that talks about everything and anything NBA-related.
Honestly, the best thing that all of us can do are post about the sports we’re watching, and use the appropriate hashtags so that it’s easier for sports to trend and for us to find each other.
i don’t want to speak poorly of other communities, but the lw community has been pretty low on content, even during the season. I think that !nba@nba.space has been getting more traffic nowadays… They are now planning to move the community elsewhere, and I asked if they wanted to join efforts and got largely ignored.
I’m starting to think the Fediverse has the wrong focus. We keep talking about growing MAU and promoting “the Fediverse” as if it’s a product, but that’s backwards. Before Reddit and Twitter, niche communities grew around websites like fansites, blogs, and tools that happened to have a forum attached. People came for the content, and stayed for the conversation.
So instead of just telling people to join Lemmy or Mastodon or promoting sports on Lemmy, we should embed Fediverse features into purpose-built websites. That creates a feedback loop: the site promotes the community, and the community fuels the site. You can build out unique features like scoreboards, event calendars, or curated resources and then use Lemmy threads as the discussion layer. Some users will interact directly on the site, while others can subscribe via their own Fediverse client. Everyone wins.
That’s exactly what I’m trying to do with Vegan Home Cooks. I’m syncing Lemmy posts into the site, but I’m also building out original features beyond just the forum. The goal is for the site to be the thing people discover and remember, with federation as the invisible engine underneath. I’m still figuring out the recipe for success, but I think this model has more potential than evangelizing Lemmy.
the fundamental problem IMO is searching. most people want a straightforward path to a place to view content and the fediverse is weak on that.
Then make themed instances. Everyone wants to make general purpose instances probably with our particular brand of politics on it so we get soc dem c/linux and dem soc c/linux and communist c/linux and we have no values of our own other than hatred of America c/linux.
Make an instance where only communities about music are allowed. Or about sports, or TV/movies. Let that be where that content lives, on a website that refuses to host religious content like c/fuckcars at the domain level.
Phrased another way, trying to make !charlottehornets@sh.itjust.works is trying to start a niche community in a niche community in a niche community. Founding !charlottehornets@sportslemmy.net is one fewer shell of nichedom.
You got me. I was like, “There’s a sportslemmy.net?!” Then I tried to go there, and apparently it doesn’t exist. 😢
lemmy.sport
Doh! You got me again, there’s no lemmy.sport!
Be the change you want to see in the world.
If I knew anything about setting up and running an instance, I would, but I actually have less than no knowledge on how to do that. Like negative knowledge.
Fortunately Lemmy is an open source project with accessible documentation: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/administration.html
Organically…
There was some dude who wanted to “promote sports” and he did that by making over 100 communities that all had individual mod bots who posted constantly
All that did was get everyone to block any sports posts because it blended in with spam.
Make a couple posts for big stuff, but if you don’t get engagement, the answer isn’t to increase quantity, it’s to increase quality.
Like, post a thread for an important match, but expect most comments to be made after the game. And your sport has 20 games a week, posting 40 threads one for each team just dilutes it.
Maybe do a weekly recap thread or just post highlight videos to draw people in.
Bot posting is just going to end up as spam if no one engages, and everytime someone blocks it early for spam, that’s a user that may have stuck around and contributed for years if it had a better start
There needs to be a critical mass of people otherwise it will be just a random handful of people screming into the void. I was posting almost daily on football and basketball communities since the reddit diaspora. So far !nba@nba.space has 2 or 3 regular contributors. The other basketball communities are even worse.
2 or 3 regular contributors
But how many lurkers? 2 or 3 regular contributors with interesting takes is enough for me to pop from time to time in space I don’t comment.
Also, a new user founding a small community of 3 active members postings for a year or two will probably join while it probably past mass posting without comment or a place without content history.
Maybe do a weekly recap thread or just post highlight videos to draw people in.
This is a great idea. I’m never going to open a match thread, but if I see a highlight clip I’ll probably watch it. Keep the spam down and it’ll grow organically.
Second comment to add an unrelated thought. As big tech platforms crack down harder and harder, the fediverse could easily gain popularity by becoming the home of sports piracy. Just an instance you could visit to find the latest working stream for any given game would attract a lot of folks, I would think. It’s just a matter of finding a group willing to take on that amount of risk. However, I’m not sure this gains the fediverse the reputation or audience we want.
Sounds to me like you’re trying to reinvent the wheel. Just post about sports to existing platforms.
I know people already do, because I have to mute new hashtags on mastodon all the time 🤷
I still need to go to Reddit and YouTube to get basketball commentary, and popular hashtags can get pretty overwhelming and targeted by spammers - try following #football on tags.pub and you get repeated posts from different sources about the same news and very little commentary.
!nba@lemmy.world had game threads during the playoffs. Obviously they had to be consolidated by game day because there are fewer participants. But there was automatic score updates and other stuff.
Match threads are a good idea, but it’s the kind of thing that can be hard to do properly on a certain scale in AP, especially if automated. Imagine a basketball/volleyball/tennis match that has many score updates per minute. Each update will mean sending out potentially hundreds/thousands of new messages to the servers around the Fediverse.
and you get repeated posts from different sources about the same news and very little commentary.
Buddy…
You’re gonna fix that by making a bunch more bot posts?
Don’t you understand that will obviously just make more posts and further divide the comments?
Buddy, who said anything about making bot posts?
It’s the second post where you show up with some bs condescending commentary and assuming the worst about the poster. Do you talk with people like that in real life, or are yiu just this grating online?
Ideally someone would make a sport-focused instance … so we can easily block it all at once.
lol. I did not want to be negative on the post but that would also be a big convenience for me.
An instance dedicated for sport
There are plenty already…
with bots to repost news from major outlets
I think most people on lemmy hate bots
they also don’t care about sports… it’s a probably a different venn diagram for sports fans and caring if it’s a bot creating their feed
on their own, lemmy users won’t share enough sports news100% I followed and tried to contribute to the NBA community quite a bit, but it was definitely tedious pulling highlight posts from reddit to post to to Lemmy constantly.
I ended up just botting it and have my own personal feed of highlights. It was also a bit odd because I would’ve loved to have botted it for the community but it’s a bit weird botting for a community you aren’t admin on.
How helpful would federating with sports-related topics in Flipboard be?
Very, but last I checked Flipboard’s federation had some bugs that were not possible to work around… announced activities did not have a stable timestamp, it uses only the magazine as the actor (so we have no way to interact with the person that actually flipped/commented on their topic, etc). But it would be really cool if flipboard users could have Lemmy communities mapped to their magazines, so make the interaction between the two sides seamless. @greg@flipboard.social , what do you think?
Maybe someone needs a Mastodon sports feed and then to post those articles here consistently.
This is something I’ve been working on lately.
I’ve created !sports@quokk.au, a general sports community as we lack the userbase for too many fragmented comms for each sport/team especially niche ones.
The instance runs on PyLova which supports tags and flairs, so you can view only NFL, WNBA, Football, AFL, or etc posts (Posts from Lemmy unfortunately don’t get or set this information).
I’ve also added a Live Post feature to PyLova, so if there was a big game on people could have the post open and auto see new comments come in as people talk about it live.
I would love some more ideas on how we can execute this, as I agree it’s something missing from the Threadiverse. In the meantime I’ll start work on adding a live score counter feature and see how Reddit does it.
The one thing I can’t program however is user engagement via commenting. That’s something people are just going to have to do as they discover the community.
This seems interesting, but I’m assuming it would only work for users on PyLova, right?
PyLova is a fork of PieFed and flairs and tags are their shared feature.
sportsbots.xyz exists and is great. if we want this place to be great for sports, it has to have lots of people who want to talk about them. so it can’t make anyone who isn’t lefty feel unwelcome. that an honest comment expressing a commonly held view in society could lead to harassment and/or defederation. we all have sports loving family members who while they’d never troll anyone, we’d never invite here because of their politics. that’s the main deterrent to our growth imo.
Agreed. I think very simply the nerdy tech stuff and constant politics is a turn off for a majority of sports fans. So much of sports is about people from all backgrounds coming together to enjoy the fun and competition.
I follow some accounts on sportsbots, but it’s not the same. AFAIK it’s only mirroring Twitter accounts. Also, if there is a lesson I learned from building alien.top is that excessive reliance on bot accounts to bootstrap communities also make organic adoption more difficult.
Many of these probably need some custom software features but they should not break compatibility with existing fediverse that much. Here, one can make a platform fully dedicated to sport(s), yet fully compatible with other parts of 'verse.
- Let users set their followed disciplines, teams, and maybe even announce it? Groups for fans of specific side?
- More seamless live-posting during events.
Events are already used by e.g. Mobilizon and PieFed and one could from event page come to a prepared live feed (input box already prepopulated with appropriate hashtags as they tend to be predictable, /kbin-style attributing federated posts via tags to these feeds, etc.). - “Fan’s treasure” or „skarb kibica”, like it’s called in Poland. All must have information on the season’s athletes, teams and pitches/tracks/whatever. Here, it could be done via wiki.
- Leverage of APIs (many of which are free) for showing results, etc.
- Integration with external video platforms. I doubt, that big sport is going to be broadcast via PeerTube or Owncast, but even some high profile events are available on e.g. YouTube. During every year’s 24 heures du Mans, several racing teams set up live streams from their cars for publicity. If users could watch these streams (and switch between them) and comment events on the track via our federated site’s account, this could even work, at least for this kind of event?
Live event posting should be compatible more with microblogging, Lemmy-like discussion works more for periods between or just after the match.
Yes, now we are talking! These are all great ideas and even something that I could get to work on the topic-specific instances. The only current limitation I see is that nor Lemmy or Piefed work as OAuth identity providers, so there is no way to, e.g, allow someone to allow to a custom frontend with their Lemmy handle and federate events from these other features.
The folks behind monsterdon have the number one feature I want, which is the ability to replay social media posts, synchronized with the broadcast. If you miss monsterdon live, they have an app that lets you indicate when you start the movie, and then it shows all the toots offset from when you started the movie, as if you were watching it live with everyone else. It’d be awesome if I could do the same with a match-specific hashtag.
