On lemmy.ca we have semi-active Hockey pages, especially due to the playoffs, check out !hockey@lemmy.ca, 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.

Go Bills, fellow Reddit expat and I definitely miss just getting news posted about the team and Lemmy is nowhere near that level of activity. I’ve ended up just going back to old.Reddit and browsing new here and there - no commenting, not logged in, so it’s not nearly as time consuming as it used to be. Hopefully someday people will use Lemmy for stuff like this!

The F1 communities are fairly active but TBF it's mostly because a few people regularly post news articles

I think I’ve generally been less interested in sports as the pro leagues gatekeep more of their games behind multiple paywalls and less interested in college sports as NIL and conference realignment has killed the traditions and the connection between the students, athletes, and alumni.

If you weren’t already a sports fan, I can’t imagine a much worse time to become one

Easy enough to block the sports communities from your feed if you browse c/all if you dont like them. I say someone set up the sports communities and start posting articles to see if we can get more adoption by the sports folks over here. I dont have the patience for sports but more users is good. Some sports people are obnoxious but some certainly aren't (Bill Bppurr comes to mind) and userbase growth is needed.

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!

Does a kind of underground system like Lemmy appeal to sports fans?

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.

Lemmy is full of a bunch of older neckbeards, based on my observations. (Inclusive of me)

This is just one narrow view on things, tho.

We’re here there’s just not a lot of us yet

I think it's also just tricky because sports fans tend to want to follow discussion of their team, which splits for example the soccer/football community into hundreds of sub-communities. I used to follow r/panthers (I am a long suffering charlotte home team supporter) but such a community doesn't exist on lemmy. Similarly, you don't really see active individual video game communities on lemmy even though that is more up the alley of the average lemmy user.

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:

!formula1@lemmy.world with nearly 10k subscribers.

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

!formuladank@lemmy.world with 4.1k subscribers.

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