The small scale of Lemmy's active user base is never more evident than in the absence of active members in all the sports related communities.

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?
- 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:
  !weightroom@sh.itjust.works
  Here's a totally random community about strength and hypertrophy training for example
  
  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.
  
  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.🍻
  
  Thanks for that link! I was almost gonna start one myself. Gonna try that one instead, at least for a while.
  
  A lot of people like OP are passive consumers
  Passive consumers make up the largest number; the base of the pyramid. But you seem to be implying that there's nothing between that and the tip of the pyramid, who create their own communities and post their own content into them.
  OP seems to be a user in the middle. Happy to contribute to ongoing conversations by commenting, replying, and voting, but not as comfortable starting conversations. Which, to be honest, is also where I'm at with sport threads. I used to love popping in to a live game discussion megathread to comment on a particularly outrageous call, or to see the community's response to something controversial. But it's not a subject area I'm invested in enough to start the community myself, or to make enough comments to help start a lively-looking megathread.
- 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.
  
  The problem there might be that people hate league of legends
  
  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
  
  I didn't claim it would be easy or even a guaranteed success
- 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.
- Reddit was relatively niche, Lemmy even more so. Who the fuck do you think is gonna be here!?
  
  Not sure if agreeing with me, but yea that's pretty much what I was getting at.
  Reddit was niche, but I don't think so anymore. Fidelity bank, Logitech, Microsoft, and many many more have official accounts and support subs on there, and have for many years.
- You just planted the seed, will you also be a watering can?
  Im not implying there is a lack of content just a lack of active users to fuel discussions. I leave a comment on every NFL post that I have some input or opinion on. Like I said to another comment in this thread there seems to either be a bot or a dedicated mod who is periodically supplying content in batches of posts. So maybe once a week or so (maybe once a month in the off seadon) the same user name will make a bunch of posts for all the news for that week.
  
  Dude make an NHL community and I'm in

Did you see that ludicrous display last night?
- What was Wenger thinking, sending Walcott on that early?
  
  The thing about Arsenal is they always try to walk it in.
- (The original site, vectorbelly, is not loading for me, but fortunately I found this backup)
  
  We tried our best but we couldn't stop them and they outplayed us now we're looking forward to next week and we're not going to focus on this loss our defense just needs to make more stops and our offense needs to put more points on the board we've got such a great group of guys and this loss is going to make us work harder and we'll see if we can't get a win next week
- 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.
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gWJIQm9qH-w
- Every time someone talks sport I think of this.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f27IqVo5-Oc

!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?

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.
- So learn how to fuckin filter and subscribe to take control of your feed and go piss and moan in those threads.
  
  I can and I do. Its easy enough to block simple angry fuckers like you one at a time. Thanks for volunteering to sit down and shut up in my feed.

Lemmy is full of a bunch of older neckbeards, based on my observations. (Inclusive of me)
This is just one narrow view on things, tho.

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.

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.
  
  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.

Dude. Sports is literally everywhere. It doesn't need to reach its greedy tendrils into yet another corner of society.

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?

Yeah, I try to engage on the sports posts because there isn’t much going on in these comms. But I’m hopeful we can get some growth eventually
- Maybe making a sports related instance could help with making it more attractive to the fans. Or ask your favorite sports team to create an instance forum.sparta.cz or something and it's a lemmy instance.
  
  There’s fanaticus.social already; it’s just not heavily used because nerds generally aren’t huge sports fans.

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.
- It takes time to adjust to that
  Coming from Reddit I was used to that level of crow anonymously and here people be remembering what you said in that other posts.
  I have find out that since noticing that I tend to be more careful with what I post.
- what about subs? lemmy subs
  
  The Philadelphia ones identify as hoagies.
  
  There's a comm on lemmynsfw, if you're interested in subs.

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.

Does anyone else feel like these national leagues have become just as disconnected from reality as any other hyper capitalist enterprise?
I want more hometown sports. I daydream about leagues funded by local communities, starring local talent, with smaller local crowds. Is there anyone else out there who would give much more of a shit if things were a little more close to home, reality-wise? Am I alone?
Guys getting paid literally hundreds of millions to play a sport is unrelatable. A local star making $300k and being a part of the community feels better to me. Seems like we should be able to afford a lot of those for the money we are spending.
I know next to nothing about sports or the business around them, but I know I remember summer nights with cheap hotdogs and minor league ball that seem to have evaporated as the wealthy accumulated. 🤷‍♂️
- There are still lots of minor leagues and they still serve cheap hotdogs tbh
- That's just a byproduct of how popular and in demand sports are for people to consume.
  And here's the kicker. For their worth, athletes are still underpaid for what they bring in the owners.
  
  For their worth, athletes are still underpaid for what they bring in the owners
  But that's by definition true of any employee under capitalism, isn't it?
  Or are you saying that the percentage of the value they bring their owners that they see in pay is significantly lower than it is for other types of workers?
- Yeah; I've had that thought a lot the last few years. Especially where the team is based around people from the area so your team are actually representative of who you're cheering for.
  I'm not remotely social enough to make the connections to start anything like that, though.
- I want more hometown sports. I daydream about leagues funded by local communities, starring local talent, with smaller local crowds.
  With pros, it's just whichever fucker can get paid enough to bring them here. I don't give a shit about their playing. I only watch because it's someone I know, so I can go congratulate them later. Otherwise, I'd much rather be playing the damn game. The highest I'll go is high school level sports. Those kids are still a part of my community. I know their parents, I probably know them.
  Maybe, maaaaaybe, I'd watch other local adults play, but only if they're my friends. It would be much better to just have more participation in adult leagues within the community. I'd play a thousand times against others in my area, getting my ass kicked if the good fellas join together, before I'd watch a game with people I don't know.
- The western new york community is just a large scale hometown community. Prolly where Buffalo got the name city of neighbors. I get what you are saying but I dont watch many national sports coverage media, im just looking for a source for news breaks from people like Rappaport, amd Schefter. As for publications i generally stick to The Athletic and our local WGR550. Im definitely not interested in watching any of the ESPN shows for the same reasons I bathing you outlined.

Thankfully our !nba@lemmy.world community is semi-active. Obviously not as much as r/nba, but we do have active mods and game day threads.

HAHA SPORTSBALL GUYS.
! DAE HANDEGG????1
PLEASE CLAP
- Yeah but did you try Linux
- I was gonna make the sportsball comment and you crushed my spirit.
- Did you have a stroke?
  
  You certainly seem like you've had a few brain clots.

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).

"I like the absence of corporate shills and ads." Also, why doesn't anyone talk about sports teams owned by billionaires and corporations?
- And once those pricks get a hold of Lemmy they will ruin it just like reddit.

I think it's also just tricky because sports fans tend to want to follow discussion of their team, which splits for example the soccer/football community into hundreds of sub-communities. I used to follow r/panthers (I am a long suffering charlotte home team supporter) but such a community doesn't exist on lemmy. Similarly, you don't really see active individual video game communities on lemmy even though that is more up the alley of the average lemmy user.
- Yeah it does. I mean ill double check but im pretty sure im subscribed to all 32 individual communities for NFL and NHL teams. Some are more active than the actual community for the league the team is in.

The F1 communities are fairly active but TBF it's mostly because a few people regularly post news articles

the Liverpool FC community is a good example of this LOL
one of the biggest teams in the world, winning the EPL and the most popular community has only a few people that post a comment and rarely is there a post more then just the mod doing a gameday thread
- Probably the Liverpool FC community is full of people who don't even know the word privacy. They probably heard about it in a Malus ad and think it means buying an iPhone and installing Telegram.
  
  you feeling bitter about the Crystal Palace loss?
- Exactly what im talking about. I should've looked up their username and gave them credit but the lemmy nfl community is the same way It basically has one dude posting all the posts at one time. So there will be community silence for days then all of a sudden 15 posts of articles from the past week or so. Might be a bot doing it tho cuz they've never added a comment or replied to any posts I've made.

F1 sometimes reaches the frontpage
- European sports on Lemmy are a lot more active than American ones

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?
  
  Yeah, creative writing communities like r/AmITheAsshole, r/relationshipadvice, or r/offmychest.
- 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.

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.

Try being into less mainstream sports. It's like me and one other guy talking to each other over on !sumo@lemmy.world
- It's the middle of the current tournament-- great time to be watching!

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!

Maybe Lemmy has a decent amount of users who are more inclined to nerd stuff like Linux and frisbee? I don't care for sports or cars or other "cool" dude stuff. But I love computers and books and frisbee (which I don't get to throw nearly enough). This just got me thinking. I'm gonna actively try to get some friends together to toss the bee. In my forties. Like we were in our teens. Thanks for inspiring me.
- or used to be into sports then gambling became legal and feel its less real and sympathy for friends struggling with gambling now
  
  This is kind of where I am. Gambling has killed any authenticity in the fandom to the point where if I watch a game with friends they are just all on their phones cons
- I'm in my 40s too and just finished playing spring league Ultimate Frisbee. It's was a ton of fun, but I did get a lot of inflammation in my knees.
  I also use Linux a lot, but also wish there's was more sports talk on Lemmy, especially NHL. I thought more people woukd jump ship off reddit after the 3rd party apps were banished.

On lemmy.ca we have semi-active Hockey pages, especially due to the playoffs, check out !hockey@lemmy.ca, and some of the team pages get occasional posts. The advantage of being a lemmy.ca user is that you will encounter small sports team and small Canadian city page posts more often in local feed.
I think before a Buffalo Bills page takes off we need a relatively active American football page. But sports commentary is not very intriguing to me and feels very formulaic: "Go [team name] Go", "Coach [name] sucks", "Next season we've drafted [name] to our team", etc. etc.

Literally just post everything you find interesting and upvote elsewhere

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.

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.

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 🤙

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.
- I dont think so. Unfortunately NFL and NHL memes arent as big as other sports meme c9mmunities cuz of the helmets not allowing for much expression without any animation. I could see NBA or FIFA (and all other soccer/futball leagues) having a much better shot at having an affiliated meme community.

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.

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.🙂

Sports are dumb anyway!
- So original and edgy! To each their own🍻
  
  I should have used /s, just joshin
- Nah, they promote teamwork and physical fitness which are both good things.
  
  Is that why everyone is drinking beer during matches and eating tons of fast food?

Sometimes I wish that I was into sports, it seems very fun! I feel like I would need to know people irl who are into sports in order to get into sports though. Are sports memes a big thing? I feel like those should/could be a big thing.
- Back on reddit, there was at least one sub dedicated to memes I between just a single division (nfcnorthmemewar, or something close) and it was always hilarious. Definitely miss the regular sub and the meme subs here.
- Sometimes I wish that I was into sports, it seems very fun!
  Of the top 10 greatest times I've ever had, prolly 7 are from attending Bills games, or thr PGA Championship, or Sabres games
  I feel like I would need to know people irl who are into sports in order to get into sports though.
  Just pick a team, start wearing their gear and the friends will come. Lol its a great way of meeting people. You dont need to learn too much to understand the game enough to become a fan. A quick youtube video to explain the game then look up any of the number of documentaries that exist for every amd any team to learn their story/history and you are good to go.
  Once you start meeting people and tell them you just started getting into it, other fans are going to be delighted to share their knowledge or answer questions. You'll be apart of a community that will always have your back.
  My local team is thr Buffalo Bills, our star quarterback's name is Josh Allen. When Josh's grandma died, Bills fans everywhere started donating $17 (Josh's jersey number) to his charity for children's hospital. We raised over a million dollars and today there is a whole wing added to children's hospital dedicated to Josh's grandmother that was built with the funds of his charity.
  Im not guna pitch any team for you to follow but I will say that if I were you, id want to join the greatest fan community of any sport of all time, the Buffalo Bills' Billsmafia lol.
  Are sports memes a big thing? I feel like those should/could be a big thing.
  The sports meme market is booming. NBA is prolly the king of sports memes. There are prolly reation memes you have seen a thousand times but didn't know were from sports.
  The last bit of advice id give is to get into the fantasy sports of whatever team you choose. Its the best way of learning which players are good on other teams, what plays to cheer for or be pissed about, but mostly it'll teach you how the game's statistics work. Plus they're really fun and great way meet new friends. If you are interested in learning more there was a comedy series on FX that was really good that was all about a group of friends and their fantasy football league called, "The League."

Everyone’s already hit the high points.
Sports fanbase tends to not be a tech base, which Lemmy primarily is.
Sports are paywalled to hell and back, the userbase here is far more inclined to avoid paywalls and the content behind it.
People dislike the celebrity gossip and stuffed suits surrounding sports.
My own personal disregard for sports leans more towards the dislike of the monied celebrity of the entire genre, the worship of the players, and the pointless obsession and discussion of things like stats that have all the meaning of dowsing rods. But that’s literally just my opinion and obviously plenty of people feel otherwise.

We’re here there’s just not a lot of us yet

Crazy idea: use a bot? A lot of communities already do it to help with lack of folks where the techies dont regularly post. You can still get your news here and you will likely attract other folks like you (maybe tell them over on other places that we now have sports news). Just trying to help
- Please no
  That's not real content. It is just lots and lots of spam.
  
  For news and sport it could be useful.
  Tag it as bot generated. Don't allow bot comments.
  
  Thanks for your opinion. Do you post in that community? Do you have a better idea? If you can answer both questions with no I would ask what differs your post from spam.
  
  So don't let your account see bot accounts
  That's a you problem

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.

As a Canadian, it's the one place I can go to Canadian communities and not be completely buried by fucking hockey. Even this whole elbows up thing is fucking terrible. I get why. I understand that people have been indoctrinated to this and it's part of their identity here. I don't understand why it has to be absolutley everywhere though.

This is a safe space for mathletes! We left our bullies behind in high school 🤓
- Cool story, bro. Couldn't imagine why someone like you who makes ignorant comments of topics they have no interest in would ever get bullied but good for you!
  
  Why u mad tho?

As a Sabres fan, I don't have much to say lol
- There is only one thing to say:

Lemmy has sports communities? ;)

We like sports and we don't care who knows.
- Just 2 guyz having a good time...

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.

Imagine if some random medium sized sports forum decided to move/switch to Lemmy? Would be cool I guess.
- Careful what you wish for

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

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

Counterpoint: as soon as sports and their related normies became popular and took over Reddit, it went to complete shit.
- Lol ok. So reddit went to shit 10-15 years ago? Breezing over the opinionated over generalization, even if it was the case it wasn't true for the individual subreddits. R/BuffaloBills was still an amazing community with amazing user base even at the point of my leaving reddit. My proudest moment of being a Bills fans and being apart of a community was every time r/buffalobills and billsmafia raised millions on top of millions of dollars for Osheas Children's hospital, Andy Dalton's charity and Damar Hamlin"s charity.

When the sports centric folk start appearing here in large numbers so will a lot of the garbage that comes with having a non tech userbase.

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’m not sure that your conclusion follows your premise.