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.
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.
Well here’s what I’ve seen tried:
Make a WHOLE BUNCH of communities on a general purpose instance, one for each team in a league, and then add a bot to each one that posts game results or scores or whatever the fuck they’re called, so that anyone sorting by New sees nothing but redundant sports statistics until they go through the process of blocking everything you’ve done to make the rest of the platform usable again.
I think it’s just not having critical mass. I’m still stuck on Reddit for MLB stuff, because they have:
- gameday threads with box scores that update in realtime
- active conversation under each gameday thread
The fediverse just doesn’t have that. Another issue is that inter-server federation slows things down. People are generally refreshing during the commercial breaks, and they want to see everyone’s takes and reactions on that last bad call right now, not in five minutes. In five minutes, the game has moved on. I wonder if building a cool sports app around matrix/xmpp would work better? The play by play feed could update instantly, conversations could be threaded around the plays, etc. It would also be easier to develop some kind of betting bot. Not for real money, of course, but a lot of my friends announce positions and we just track everyone’s win/lose rate in our local circle.
To the folks saying it’s a demographics issue, not a tooling one: if that was the case, how come the fediverse has attracted a grand total of zero e-sports people? These are tech folks, often more closely aligned with our values than nascar guys for example, but the fediverse hasn’t attracted a single one. That’s what makes me think the problem is that it’s harder to have conversations around real-time data and events on the fediverse.
LiveThreadBot@sopuli.xyz did provide live scores for me during the FIFA World Cup. I did try to come out and comment on a couple threads. So a score of 1.1 out of 2 on this criteria?
Unfortunately it doesn’t work anymore, see the pinned post on !football@sopuli.xyz
I think it’s just not having critical mass.
It’s definitely a huge part of the issue. Also demographics. The techy slant the Fediverse has does not seem to have a huge overlap with sports. That’s why I can mostly survive on Lemmy when it comes to Formula 1 discussion (although it’s still sparsely populated) while football (soccer) is much less active here.
how come the fediverse has attracted a grand total of zero e-sports people?
Hey, I post discussion threads for The International (Dota 2) every year, and usually get some replies and discussions in them too! I would say it’s even somewhat close to the activity level football (soccer) sees, though less than F1.
But in general I think Esports is just less popular overall than regular sports, so that’s your answer.
how come the fediverse has attracted a grand total of zero e-sports people?
I try to keep !starcraft@lemmy.world posted with big tournaments, and !speedrun@sh.itjust.works but I know that doesn’t count as esports lol
Edit: autocorrect
Another problem might be lack of algorithm. No, hear me out! Sure, the Algorithms on big social media lock us all in our little bubbles. But even there, I often have a moment of “Why on earth is that in my recommended?” I personally don’t care about e-sports, so I had absolutely no idea it was even happening anywhere on fedi, and would be unlikely to find out unless I went looking. I wonder how many sports enjoyers are on Lemmy, all assuming “Lemmy isn’t a sports place”, so they never look for sports content, and thus never find any? I enjoy a couple twitch streamers and some VTubers, so occasionally youtube goes “yolo” and throws some kind of e-sports thing my way. I never click it, but I am vaguely aware that DOTA2 is an esports thing that exists and people care about it, and sometimes a big event or tournament or something happens, and I could follow it on YouTube or Twitch if I wanted to. But because Lemmy has no algorithm and I would never subscribe to an e-sports sub myself, I’ll just never encounter it here.
PS: I’m not old and out of touch. I’m completely blind and out of touch with esports because it intersects in zero ways with anything I can perceive, participate in, or care about. LOL
No I agree. The Fediverse needs more algorithm driven frontends for people who want that. The only one I know of is for Lemmy not Mastodon
https://quiblr.com/understanding_your_private_personalized_feed
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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. EDITED - and man there are a ton of sports communities already. Many specific to specific teams.
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
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.
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.
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 news
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.
What is it that drives your desire to increase the size of the fediverse and what makes you think that sport is something that everyone cares about?
If you want to have more sports because it interests you, then start a community on an instance that wants it, or failing that start your own instance and put whatever you want on it.
The beauty of the fediverse experience is that I can choose to engage with or ignore your efforts exactly to the extent of my level of interest, as can everyone else.
What you appear to have failed to understand is that there is nobody who will do this for you, it’s your responsibility to do the work.
The “space dominance” you refer to is not real. There’s exactly as much space available as you want, because all of it is virtual.
We’re not here to make money, we’re here to build a community and the decentralized nature of the fediverse is intended to keep communities small, cohesive and personal, rather than large, disjointed and impersonal.
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.
