If they were shutting down their mastodon instance but continuing their efforts to work on Social Media that is open and not just an instrument of Surveillance Capitalism, you'd have a point.
But they didn't. They shut down the instance because of some internal political struggle and their interest in becoming an ad company themselves.
Political. Steve Teixeira was the one championing the focus on social. Apparently the faction that wanted him out won, and now they are getting rid of his babies, too.
They shouldn't be "running a social media", they should be working on making their browser the best client for the Social Graph that is ActivityPub.
Nonsense. There is also /r/football, which is quite large and to me has more interesting discussion than /r/soccer and less obnoxious mods, but /r/soccer still maintains its dominance.
It's not the name that matters. It's the content and the match threads.
I am not arguing that. I am just saying that this is a very lame reason to avoid using it.
If I had found any "football" or "footy" domain that costs less than an used car, I would have used it. But soccer was cheaper, and football@soccer is redundant and kind of senseless.
Buddy, you are running out of excuses... ;)
At the moment the priority is to grow the community enough that’s not only me posting.
I'd be posting as well, and if you see the NFL communities, they are also getting some momentum from Mastodon users.
Running the topic based instances are not the main costs. Even if I went to shut down Communick (I won't, because believe it or not it's getting close to break even) the last thing I would let go are the domains, which can/could be easily transferred to some organization.
I can make you moderator of the communities, so it would be one more reason to move there?
That has been exactly my reasoning when I created the topic specific instances, and I have been trying to convince @blaze@feddit.org to get out of LW and into !talk@soccer.forum
Regarding a "general" sports instance, I have setup https://athletic.center/ some long ago, but never got to create communities for it. I was thinking of using it for less sports that are less "professional" and more suitable for hobby practitioners (e.g, sailing, skiing, diving, swimming, CrossFit, etc) the main reason, to be totally honest, is that sport.* are quite expensive.
This is my frontpage on Lemmy now.
Adding URL with screenshot, because Mastodon apparently can not render images from comments: https://communick.news/pictrs/image/545dcbad-8894-473f-8a3d-fd4a93bb7afa.webp
Open source or GTFO. :)
Seriously, Lemmy is AGPL. Any client you do and any functionality you build on top of it must be AGPL as well.
Unless the lawsuit is a fabrication, you are literally dismissing a story just based on who is telling it.