Fediverse

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.

How helpful would federating with sports-related topics in Flipboard be?

As far as I know reddit just uses APIs or straight up scrapes data to create their live game posts. (Fucking hypocrites). Is there anything stopping the fediverse from doing such a thing?

At first it was users creating their own bots that posts these threads. Now I guess they made it an official thing? I haven't looked at sports on new reddit.

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.

Ideally someone would make a sport-focused instance ... so we can easily block it all at once.

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 🤷

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

An instance dedicated for sport

@rglullis

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.

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.

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.

Maybe someone needs a Mastodon sports feed and then to post those articles here consistently.