Thoughts on bringing sportbots.xyz to Lemmy?

[email protected]

If there is interest in this content, users will create a Lemmy community and post content there.

This is clearly not true. Content is missing and not everyone takes the initiative to post to help bootstrap communities. We don't have content here because we don't users, and we don´t have users because we don't have content.

Maybe they will even link to the sportsbots mirror.

Which would be fine, except that sportbots mirror does not have a page of its own. It is built in a way to just push the updates to its followers.

I had proposed to Lemmy devs a system to let people post ActivityPub content directly, but this was considered more trouble than its worth (to them).

But don’t just set up a script to do it for you, that’s just something people are going to block.

Not everyone

Admiral Patrick

There is no information on sportbots about how many accounts they have listed, but I'm guess it's in the "high hundreds - low thousands" range.

That's way too many bots for people to block. Yes, I'm aware there's a setting to block all bots, but that's too all or nothing.

If you insist on going that route, maybe stand up a dedicated instance like one of the other repost instances (and only post to local communities there) so people can just block that instance.

[email protected]

Yeap, all of the alternatives assume would be set under the same domain, or at most just broken down by sport.

[email protected]

I think there has to be some level of curation. I set up a queue to post loops to [email protected], but I didn't just write a script that posts everything. I use Loops myself and add things I think are interesting to the queue to be posted. It's a lot of manual work, but I'm happy to do it for now to help grow the Fediverse, and I enjoy watching the loops anyways.

You could accomplish this with more automatic curation, such as automatically reposting stuff that's highly upvoted or has some other signal that it's interesting. I didn't do that for Loops because there's a lot of stuff that's highly-upvoted and is just stuff scraped from TikTok and I don't care for those. I would probably use this approach if I didn't want to wade through myself to find signal.

[email protected]

Sounds like there should be a page for sportsbots then. Mirroring “hundreds to low thousands” of accounts to Lemmy just sounds insane and poorly curated.

[email protected]

I'm old enough to remember when Reddit had a built-in RSS feed reader. You could add the RSS feeds you'd like to follow and it would present it to you on a separate page. But the cool thing is that you could up/downvote it like any other link. This meant that every blog entry could become a submission on its own, and all the user had to do was upvote it.

I tried to build something similar on the Fediverser page, but to this there is still too much friction. People need to:

Sign up to the Fediverser site
Become a community ambassador
Add different RSS feeds as content sources
Get in the habit of visiting the site to repost the contents they think it's interesting.

[email protected]

With approaches (2) and (3) we don't have to mirror all of the accounts and we don't have to mirror every post from them.

[email protected]

You're one of the big posters I don't mind seeing and now it makes sense why. The way so many of the other top posters (well, two in particular but I won't name them) post feels so....soulless. Either spamming 20 memes they saved off Instagram that day in 10 minutes or posting Reddit's Greatest Hits.

As much as I'd love if everything was OC, I MUCH prefer the curated approach to making Lemmy yet another bucket to archive everything from every other site

Baron Von J

As the mod of a couple of sports communities it would be nice to have some more automated content being posted (like game-day match threads, player trades, etc). However, I have yet to receive a response from sportsbots to any of my requests for adding league and team accounts to be mirrored. I don't think I'd want every one of their microblog post to show up in the communities, though.

[email protected]

That sounds handy for Mastodon and annoying for Lemmy.

[email protected]

Why would you "not want sports in Lemmy"? Like, how is a sports community (like those that already exist on here) hurting you?

[email protected]

Something like that going to relevant communities and only posting more popular things might work. I don’t want to see every Adam Schefter post in c/NFL, for example. I guess to some extent we could rely on the sorting algorithms to keep the communities from getting flooded, but it still could start drowning out the experience.

OP, maybe somebody at https://fanaticus.social/ would be interested in hosting these? It seems like their goal is to become Lemmy’s sports home.

[email protected]

Reposting based on a signal sounds like the best idea.

Because we kinda have the alternative in place: lemmit chose the way of replicating reddit posts onto a committed instance. That means that someone still has to manually go, look at - for example the F1 - lemmit, choose an interesting post there and cross-post it to the relevant lemmy community.

If the repost into a relevant lemmy community happened automatically based on a signal, that would take off work from users.

Could that signal be the number of interactions in activitypub for a sportsbots post? Or would it be the Twitter interactions?

[email protected]

fanaticus.social seems a bit zombified. Instance hasn't been updated since 0.19.3, last I checked the admin hasn't been active for months and the baseball communities (which were in the beginning the most active) were pretty much silent the whole season.

I have a handful of sports-focused instances which would surely benefit from this:

[email protected] (and communities for every NBA team)
[email protected] (and for the teams)
[email protected] (and the main leagues/biggest clubs)
[email protected]

[email protected]

There's no lack of dead sports communities around. Turning them into dead sport bot communities doesn't sound like it would help. Sports fans aren't going to show up for that.

Going through the effort of manually posting screenshots in the sports communities would go way farther than getting a bot to cross post.

[email protected]

Going through the effort of manually posting screenshots in the sports communities would go way farther than getting a bot to cross post.

Sorry, this is a bit condescending.

Go take a look at my profile. I have almost 2000 posts already. I've been posting 10-20 posts every day to all the different sport communities. Do you think that dedicating a good half-hour every day to read a bunch of feeds and sharing them is not already enough effort?

I'm not saying that we should rely only on mirror accounts, but I'm saying that it makes no sense to ignore them. I'm not proposing to take just a random army of AI slop and put it here. I'm saying that we can look at the places where the content curation already has been made and replicate it here.

[email protected]

I have almost 2000 posts already.

FYI, I see indeed 1.43k posts on your https://communick.news/u/rglullis, but https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/[email protected] only shows 597. SJW shows 617: https://sh.itjust.works/u/[email protected]

So not sure where you posted the missing ones, but it seems like it was on communities that large instances do not follow.

[email protected]

Ok, I have 1.92k comments, not posts.

[email protected]

[email protected]
[email protected], with an impressive 66 comments post 4 days ago: https://lemmy.world/post/25015517
[email protected] has 10 comments on their last posts

[email protected]

Keep pushing/promoting the LW communities...