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.
Ok but there’s zero movement in a lot of hobby communities here, and I’m not talking about niche interests. There cannot be quality when the quantity is none.
It seems like the tabletop wargaming groups are really dead, so I feel you on this, haha.
The fediverse is what you make it. If you have an interest, take five minutes and post a couple of articles a day. It’s not overly difficult to to engage with people.
Some hobbies don’t have enough “news” content. To make up for that you need more than a couple of active posters showing off what they’ve built or made.
Not to mention, every instance could theoretically have a community for a specific hobby and it splits up the activity even more. And if I sub to all those communities I generally tend to get the same post over and over again in my feed.
Then when it comes to things like news my experience has been it becomes like an echo chamber and any dissenting opinion is met with open hostility. Yes, it’s a two way street, but this post is a perfect example.
The more users you have, the less the hostility has a chance to gain hold on a post. I’ve had some really great interactions in my short time on Lemmy, but I’ve also had and seen more hostility when I tried to be civil.