I’ve just read about ClubsAll in the Fediverse Report and did some digging. It seems to be another Threadiverse service federating with Lemmy and others.

While I always welcome new platforms into the fediverse, there are some weird things with this one.

  • It isn’t open source, but the developer mentioned on ProductHunt that they want to open source it in the future.
  • You can’t run your own ClubsAll instance at the moment
  • They want you to join their Discord, but wouldn’t it be better to have the conversation around it on ClubsAll itself? I’ve found a ClubsAll Community on ClubsAll but it only has two posts from 10 months ago without any comments or upvotes.
  • Their main search bar is just a Google search
  • They want to finance it through paid accounts, awards and donations according to their about page.
  • According to their privacy policy they collect interactions with the content, like voting, bookmarking and reporting to improve and personalize the website and to develop new products and services and for marketing and promotional purposes.
  • I haven’t found content that originated on ClubsAll yet, apart from c/ClubsAll. All I’m seeing is content federated from Lemmy communities.

For me there are some red flags in there, like closed source code, paid accounts and data collection for marketing. But, correct me if I’m wrong.

  • OtterAEnglish
    2·
    20 hours ago

    There is discussion going around right now about if more instances should defederate from this project. If you have any updates on the points you mentioned above, please do share!

    I have some feedback, and I hope it doesn’t come across as being too hostile.

    we had to prioritize what would be most useful to the broader community

    How are you planning to do this in the long run? Hand picking communities will be hard to scale I want to find the communities I like, and I’m not sure I’d like a curated feed like that.

    A Lemmy instance doesn’t show content from every other Lemmy instance out there, nor does it pull all communities from federated instances. For example, lemmy.ca doesn’t pull content from every lemmy.world community, only the ones that our users search for and subscribe to. That keeps the server costs low and leaves it up to the users.

    If this is a temporary thing for testing, then disregard :)

    For federated servers to really compete, complexity needs to be eliminated. One of the goals of ClubsAll is to simplify everything, so we hide servers, instances, multiple logins etc that can be confusing and overwhelming for a new user.

    Having helped some non-technical users get started with the fediverse, it’s not actually that bad. Something like this would be more confusing because now you can’t see where that user or post is coming from. I am [email protected], but there are other people with the username otter from other instances. Will we all look like the same user? What about similarly named communities from different places, which don’t actually deal with the same subject matter.

    Instead, would you consider keeping the servers and instances but making them smaller in the UI? That way it’s not a distraction, but the information is still there.

    Seems to bring us back to the current Reddit situation with extra steps.

    That’s a valid concern. However, I’ll open source the project once I get some assistance, which should alleviate some of these fears.

    The problem the fediverse is tackling is centralization, not lack of open source. That’s what the comment was referring to. If the goal of this project is to be a one stop shop for all threadiverse content, you’re not going to find much support here.

    Reddit was once open source as well. Having the code available is helpful in some ways, such as by being open about the algorithms used, but it doesn’t solve all problems. Similarly, without a way for others to host the software, it’s hard to tell if that is the actual code running on the live server.

    That’s exactly right. This is the main reason. Unfortunately, our developer recently left, so we’re at a bit of a feature freeze for now, aside from a couple of things coming soon.

    That’s totally ok, the fediverse has many projects like this in various stages of development. The concern expressed in this thread is less about what the project is doing now, and more about clarity on what the future plans are.

    For example:

    • funding through donations instead of paid accounts, advertising, and user data

    • a confirmation on what kind of federation it will have