Feel your pain. I'm constantly thinking, what the hell do I have to do to get r/orioles to follow me over to Lemmy to grow the numbers? They are one of the only things left at Reddit that I regularly look at. But 99% of the mod and user base there just doesn't care about the the issue.
Conversely, that means that at least sports spaces are among the least bot-spammed places on Reddit. So there's that.