Is there any way I can stop seeing sports posts?

I know that people are claiming that this isn't an issue, but I am seeing the same. I just started blocking those communities every time I see one. They are probably just sorting their feed differently and assuming that their experience is the same as everyone else's. Blocking them (the bot, or the community) is really the only option.

I kept seeing European football posts. And car racing. I just block any of those communities when I see them. ADHD and autism memes too. There's a lot of those for some reason.
- Some of those memes are funny. For me it’s blocking furry porn, sports, the strange sissy hypno stuff and photos of dicks.
- Car racing? Do you happen to remember the community and instance?

I feel you. They got these bots posting results of games or whatever to each and every sports team community. But it is not one bot doing that, no that would be too easy because you could just block that, each and every sports team community got its own specifically named bot posting the exact same things.

Really messes a lot with the all/new feed.

We understand that some users in the fediverse don't want to see sports content and are frustrated with Fanaticus's game bots' daily posts.

Currently, lemmy doesn't support blocking entire instance's at a user level. Because of that limitation, I am providing a list of the current communities on Fanaticus that have active game bots and a little python script so users can block those communities.

Here's a list of the communities that currently have a game bots running:

If you're comfortable with coding, there's an API endpoint to block a community. I threw together a little python script that would block all the above (I think 🙂).

from plemmy import LemmyHttp

# must include protocol e.g. https://lemmy.world
pl = LemmyHttp("INSTANCE_NAME_HERE")

username = "USERNAME_HERE"
password = "PASSWORD_HERE"
pl.login(username, password)

fanaticus_communities = [
    "tampabayrays@fanaticus.social",
    "orioles@fanaticus.social",
    "nyyankees@fanaticus.social",
    "torontobluejays@fanaticus.social",
    "redsox@fanaticus.social",
    "minnesotatwins@fanaticus.social",
    "clevelandguardians@fanaticus.social",
    "whitesox@fanaticus.social",
    "motorcitykitties@fanaticus.social",
    "kcroyals@fanaticus.social",
    "texasrangers@fanaticus.social",
    "astros@fanaticus.social",
    "angelsbaseball@fanaticus.social",
    "mariners@fanaticus.social",
    "oaklandathletics@fanaticus.social",
    "braves@fanaticus.social",
    "miamimarlins@fanaticus.social",
    "phillies@fanaticus.social",
    "newyorkmets@fanaticus.social",
    "nationals@fanaticus.social",
    "buccos@fanaticus.social",
    "brewers@fanaticus.social",
    "reds@fanaticus.social",
    "chicubs@fanaticus.social",
    "cardinals@fanaticus.social",
    "azdiamondbacks@fanaticus.social",
    "sfgiants@fanaticus.social",
    "dodgers@fanaticus.social",
    "padres@fanaticus.social",
    "coloradorockies@fanaticus.social",
]

for comm in fanaticus_communities:
    print("Getting community: ", comm)
    commRes = pl.get_community(name=comm).json()
    if commRes and commRes['community_view']:
        commId = commRes['community_view']['community']['id']
        print("Blocking community: ", comm, " communityId: ", commId)
        pl.block_community(True, commId)
        print("Successfully blocked community: ", comm)
    else:
        print("Failed to find community: ", comm)

In the future, we are planning on adding the game bots for the other major sports as well (they’re not in season now) so I will update this script as those bots come online.

Heres a post from fanaticus.social. Worth a look if your issue arrises in all

this is quite helpful, thanks
Why not just block the bot?
- Because it's not one account but an individual user (bot) per team.

Weird, I never see any sports posts (and would be mildly interested in them.) What communities are you seeing them from and how are you browsing Lemmy?

fanaticus.social is a sports specific instance but a lot of sports communities are on .world too
idk they're team specific Communities I think, and I'm from jerboa
- What instance are you logged into and what are your Jerboa settings (are you filtering by Local/All, are you sorting by Hot?)

I tend to browse All>New and have also encountered this. Until the new Lemmy release has instance blocking, not much to do but block each community individually. There are also mobile clients that offer instance-level filtering. I’m sure someone finds it interesting (…. I guess) so I wouldn’t request defederation, but I certainly do not need a feed with 18 auto-posted threads about sports events.

I remember seeing a Lemmy feature request for hierarchical community tags. I love the idea of being able to, say, allow Game communities but block anything created under the Game -> Racing tag because I am very unlikely to have interest in it. Or in this case, block Sports altogether, that way if someone creates Sports -> American Football -> Carolina Panthers -> Panthers Memes it's already out of my view and I'm none the wiser.
Yeah I asked this question about foreign languages, and I think it was the same answer. I don't speak or read German (as the most common example I've seen) so I have to keep blocking various instances that pop up in the newest feed like whack-a-mole. Similar to physical community-specific subs and sports; I just gotta keep blocking them one at a time
- We could request that bot instance admins use a single user account vs a bunch of different users. That's the problem with fanaticus - they have a bot for every different team - and I don't see why that's necessary. A single bot, like for the HN reposters, means someone can block all the posts with a single action, which would be nice.
Its been in for a month now. Why hasn't it been released?
- I am not super up on lemmy development, but I assume they're working on the rest of the features for the release, or are busy thinking about communism.

Blocking the handful (okay more like couple dozen) sports-related bots did the trick for me.

I don't mind seeing posts I'm not interested when I scroll All, the annoying part is a wall of 20+ posts, which is mainly a problem when bots are mass-reposting content (sports score for example)

But if you're really annoyed by seeing irrelevant content, there are two main options:

Stop browsing All or Local and switch to your Frontpage, which is only the communities you've subscribed to. It's still nice to browse All once in awhile to get turned onto new communities, but there are also certain communities you can subscribe to specifically for the purpose of seeing new and trending communities.
This is more porn-related, but switch to an instance that is not federated with porn-instances. For example, I'm on lemm.ee, and I only rarely see moderately-NSFW content on All or Local.

My thing is when browsing all I want to see all, not just the most popular communities. The Hot/rising functions don't seem to work that well at least on kbin.

So I blocked a lot of the communities that show up too much or the ones that will never have anything of interest to me. It's better.
- Fully agreed that Hot/rising is garbage right now. It seems to weight very recent posts with zero comments or upvotes equally with older posts that have robust discussion, so >80% of the content is the same as sorting by New.
Blocking a handful of something hasn’t worked for me. I must have blocked about 100 anime porn sites and I still get a dozen every day in my ALL feed.

Even when I sort HOT, they still come up constantly with no comments and no upvotes.
- Refer to my second point then.

I've managed to block every US baseball, football, and MLS team. I have also gotten rid of most of the Yiff trash (man, that shit creeps me the fuck out), and the ADHD and Traps.

It's definitely not ideal. If I change devices, I will be in trouble unless this is stored server-side.

I have yiffit.com or whatever blocked but I hate that it stops me from seeing comments by users there. Just because I don't want to see furry porn on my feed doesn't mean I think people who do aren't making worthwhile comments...

Just block them. I've blocked 20 more times the number of communities and users here than on reddit.

I'm a big sports guy and I rarely see random sports posts in the wild. Could OP be viewing the "all" page maybe? We had a similar issue a few days ago with Elon Posts and I wonder if it's not a similar issue here?

I'm viewing local
- If these are local and they're botted to hell, perhaps get in contact with your instance's admins. I'm sure they don't appreciate that sort of behaviour either.
- Ah that’s why I don’t experience the same. It looks like your specific instance has a lot of bots posting the sports stuff. As the other commenter said, you can try contacting your instance admin if they can help. You can also maybe block the bot account if you can narrow it down..
- Almost nothing you can do, viewing local will show you every communities/posts especially made by bots... Just use "Subscribed" instead.

It took me a few days of browsing All and blocking anything sports, games and anime related and now it's far far better. They still pop up sometimes, but I make it a war effort to block them. It is exhausting, but worth the time.

I know you said you didn't want to stick to the subscribed feed, but can I suggest doing that while at the same time subscribing to the "trending communities" community so you can discover new ones. https://feddit.nl/post/5227714

I think blocking is just going to be a constant battle for you, as you'll likely need a blacklist of every sports team, sports team abbreviations, sports keywords etc. etc.

It's not just sports, but alot of other topics that I'm just not interested in seeing somehow dominate my feed at times. Foreign language communities that I can't even read pop up now and again. There's so many small niche communities popping up that somehow pop up in the 'Top' view for whatever reason, then you have to go through and block each on individually. Is the Fediverse so sparsely populated that literally any posts that get any sort of attention suddenly shoot to the top? I sort by Top Six Hours most of the time. I try to block them when they come up, but I feel like Reddit never had this issue, even with all the extremely niche subreddits they have. It just seems like top/trending communities aren't showing up correctly or some posts are showing up when they shouldn't.

I keep seeing [...] which I couldn’t care less about and I keep blocking the communities but they’re like thousands of millions of communities that never end. And no, I don’t wanna stick to the subscribed feed cause I wanna possibly find new communities or see posts from communities that I’m not subscribing to but are mildly interesting. I can’t think of good words to block either, without catching other communities I care about as well.

That's the fediverse for ya. The politics are relentless and the sportsball isn't that far behind. All you can do is keep blocking.

I just block them when I see sports communities. That mostly does it for me.

I think a sports instance would be great for this reason. Starting with the next major release of Lemmy, anyone would be able to block the whole damn sports instance and be done with it. Though as far as I know, the sports communities are spread throughout different instances, so it won't be that easy.

I keep blocking the communities but they’re like thousands of millions of communities that never end

There is literally like 3 of them, plus a few dozend for specifc teams, which hardly get a post per day.

This is not a real problem.

I understand where OP is coming from. I’m constantly blocking team pages, and generally when they post about a win, theres another post on a different sub about the loss. Same game. Maybe two or three posts.

If I could see my block list it’d be jammed packed with furry and sports BS subs.
idk I keep seeing posts
- I just set my view to "Subscribed" and never subscribe to those. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Haven't seen a sports post yet.
There's not. I'm really into hockey, for example. We have a "hockey" community, but there's also a community for each team. So 33 communities for hockey alone.

Though as far as I know, there's only one bot that posts scores of hockey games, and it only makes one post a day and posts all of the scores as comments under that daily post. Then it edits those comments to keep them all up to date as the games are played. I wrote that one myself, and I specifically was trying to avoid spamming with tons of posts, as there can be as many as 16 NHL games a day.