Or we are all just a bunch of nerds with better things to do than watch the people who used to beat us up.

Yeah, we prefer real news.

Sports coverage might as well be celebrity gossip for as much relevance it has when the world is going to shit.

Sports are dumb anyway!

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.

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

Thats because sports are shit, I hope they stay out.

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.

Literally just post everything you find interesting and upvote elsewhere

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!

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.

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.

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.

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:

[email protected] with nearly 10k subscribers.

But importantly there's also a place for shitposting and meming for the sport in a separate community:

[email protected] with 4.1k subscribers.

So for every one subscriber to the main community there is about 1 subscription to the meme community.

On lemmy.ca we have semi-active Hockey pages, especially due to the playoffs, check out [email protected], 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.

Try being into less mainstream sports. It's like me and one other guy talking to each other over on [email protected]

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.🙂

I’m not sure that your conclusion follows your premise.