We've grown by almost 200 subscribers in the last week and there's always room for more!
probably the most active gridiron football community on Lemmy
No probably about it, and not even just gridiron football. A quick search on lemmyverse.net shows we have more weekly active users than even !football@lemmy.world (the biggest soccer community)
Hey all, I'm from the Fanaticus instance. Not going to try to persuade anyone to switch, just wanted to offer my thoughts:
I see advantages to both communities. The fact that there is a cfb community here on the "default" instance, so to speak, means it will probably be found by newbies to the fediverse. On the other hand, if it's inactive or if lemmy.world is down (which was the case when I migrated to Lemmy), I don't know how good user retention will be. What I like about the Fanaticus instance is because it's only sports, threads are less likely to get downvoted or passed over by non-sports folks (which, let's be frank, is the majority of Lemmy users). Plus, team communities can all be in one place.
It would be nice if both communities could coexist and grow. As you've noted, that requires active mods. I definitely plan to be active on Fanaticus daily, but I can't speak for anyone else. I'm also open to cross-posting content to this instance. That works for news and even OC, but I agree it would be ideal to settle on one place for discussions (e.g. game threads and polls). Because I only found this community recently, I'm fine with submitting my poll to whichever instance can reach a bigger audience.
User flair. I know it's probably not that high on the list for most who might see it as a gimmick, but it's almost essential for sports discussion to know what team a user supports. I'm sure many other communities have compelling reasons as well.