The main community was moved from .world to !football@lemm.ee in an effort to decentralise and spread communities out instead of consolidating on .world. It’s somewhat active as smaller communities go on Lemmy, but nothing like the news hub you could use r/soccer for.
You can only start communities on your home instance as far as I’m aware. However, you can mod remote communities. It just requires some hoops to go through. What you need to do is create an alt on your desired instance, create the community there, then make your main account a mod on it.
It’s also been in a bit of an expected lull during the off-season. I think it will pick up come next weekend when the season actually kicks off.
I never actually participated in discussions on there, but r/soccer is still my go-to source for keeping up to date with football news. That’s probably the one I feel the most.
I do feel like smartphones are close to essential in modern society. I can’t say I like that, but it is what it is. From all the things you describe to stuff like sending money between each other and paying for services in today’s cashless society you really kind of struggle without one.
For me, I got my first phone at 11 or 12, but back then it was of course not a smartphone but a regular cell phone. Times were different then. Kids still interacted with each other during recess, the best distraction your phone had available was Snake. The internet as we know it wasn’t a thing. The main thing you used your phone for was actually calling people.
Yeah, Reddit benefits from the traffic regardless of the accuracy of the posts, so this is mostly wasting the time of regular people with issues who are trying to search for an answer.
Even then like, I don’t know. I don’t want my feed to be strictly chronological. For stuff like Twitter-likes and TikTok-likes I want an algorithm. I don’t want to be on there all the time, and I don’t want it to be my only form of social media. But when I do go on there I want an algorithm to serve me some slop that I don’t even know that I want but actually do.
The sequence of COVID into Season 1 of DTS into the 2021 season into new regs and the first half of 2022 was really an insane period for hype and growth. Don’t think we’ll ever see anything like it again, barring perhaps an American teenage wonderkid fighting for the world championship leading to true mainstream US adoption.