I’ll just add that BBY and Michael’s business mode is to use the Anchoring effect year round, so they can constantly offer 40-60% “discounts”. If you paid full price for anything at those stores (BBY is out of business, but still) you got ripped off.
If you go to that website directly without logging in, do you see the posts? It is entirely possible that there are no posts there - sports communities aren’t getting a lot of non-bot traffic.
If there are posts, how old are they? If you are sorting by top, you won’t see any posts that were posted outside your selected time frame.
If neither of those are the issue, I’d blame Lemmy.world. They have cloudflare rules that block other instances without listing them as defederated. It is possible they’ve moved to a whitelist or some other trust based model that blocks new instances by default.
This is a side effect of them having been under a near constant DDOS and other cyberattacks, and so is definitely defensible, however it ultimately hurt the UX for me to the point that I just moved to a different instance.
The implication is that social media is inherently not private, and it is extremely difficult to have social media benefit you without revealing personal details that can be aggregated to identify you uniquely, if not specifically.
Definitely question the services - that’s why I’m here. I have much more control over my data here than on a commercial, ad driven platform. There is nothing available through the API that isn’t available to logged in user, and remote instances don’t have access to any of my private profile data (the entirety of which is my email address).
It is fine if you don’t like Lemmy, but I challenge you to identify a social media platform that isn’t worse without being so closed that it loses the whole “social” part. If your goal is to have a blog with 4 followers, then you don’t want social media, you want a private Wordpress or wiki instance.
This is what is going to drive federated social media. Once marketing types can figure out that they won’t need to maintain 12 different social media presences and can host it on their own domain, they’ll gladly subsidize general purpose instances to make it easier for people to access their content.
(Unless you’re elected President, in which case, bully for you!)