🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

Interestingly, on my instance LiveThreadBot’s edits were way behind. I’m an admin, so I could check our incoming queue and see them building up. We’re on quite a large server (quad-core, 64 gigs of ram, etc) in a data center with excellent connectivity. So if we were having that problem, I assume a lot of instances were. For sports a backlog of five or six edits that your instance hasn’t processed yet just won’t work.

Edit: autocorrect

Another problem might be lack of algorithm. No, hear me out! Sure, the Algorithms on big social media lock us all in our little bubbles. But even there, I often have a moment of “Why on earth is that in my recommended?” I personally don’t care about e-sports, so I had absolutely no idea it was even happening anywhere on fedi, and would be unlikely to find out unless I went looking. I wonder how many sports enjoyers are on Lemmy, all assuming “Lemmy isn’t a sports place”, so they never look for sports content, and thus never find any? I enjoy a couple twitch streamers and some VTubers, so occasionally youtube goes “yolo” and throws some kind of e-sports thing my way. I never click it, but I am vaguely aware that DOTA2 is an esports thing that exists and people care about it, and sometimes a big event or tournament or something happens, and I could follow it on YouTube or Twitch if I wanted to. But because Lemmy has no algorithm and I would never subscribe to an e-sports sub myself, I’ll just never encounter it here.

PS: I’m not old and out of touch. I’m completely blind and out of touch with esports because it intersects in zero ways with anything I can perceive, participate in, or care about. LOL

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.

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.