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.

  • vinay_clubsall@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    4 days ago

    Hi everyone, I’m Vinay, the founder of ClubsAll. I’ve noticed some negative sentiment, and I can understand why. I’ll do my best to clarify all the questions raised here.

    https://clubsall.com/c/fediverse gives a 404, hiding posts such as the one we’re in. Very early censorship? Their approach to combining similar communities into one club could be the cause, and maybe they just haven’t set up the c/fediverse club yet.

    Lemmy is too big to show everything. To keep costs low and due to some technical constraints with hosting, we had to prioritize what would be most useful to the broader community. If we show everything, the database won’t be able to handle it, and I won’t be able to afford the hosting costs.

    There is no mention that this is content from lemmy.world. This is intentional. 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. We’re innovating and trying something different to help the Fediverse succeed. However, if we’re violating any community guidelines or site policies, please let us know.

    This looks like a clear monetization attempt. We just launched. Please give us time to survive and implement features before jumping to conclusions.

    They’re not contributing, and we don’t need proprietary cancer in the Fediverse.

    Sorry you feel that way. Keep in mind that we built everything from scratch. Federation is not currently implemented, and we’ll need time.

    Personally, I hope they open source, because the interface is visually appealing and quite fast. What I expect is most instances defederating from them soon, killing the product in the process.

    Thank you for the compliment! I do intend to open source ClubsAll once I get some help. I truly appreciate the feedback and hope we are not defederated.

    Being a single site, it might draw the wrong crowd and end up having serious moderation problems.

    This is insightful and another reason for us to prioritize federation.

    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.

    If you query it like a federated platform would, it returns HTML rather than the required JSON.

    Keep in mind, ClubsAll was built from scratch and is funded entirely out of pocket. We’ve done as much as we can with what’s currently online (and a couple of new features are coming soon that I’m testing).

    It seems to be a project where missing features are likely due to it still being at an early stage.

    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.

    Lack of details on how they implement federation.

    We built federation from scratch, so many features are still missing. Currently, we don’t federate, so it’s not possible to follow from elsewhere at this time.

    • BlazeEnglish
      4·
      4 days ago

      Hello,

      Thank you for commenting here! Do you have any idea of the timeframe when you’ll be able to open source the project?

      Also, what are the languages used to develop ClubsAll? Asking as depending on them the number of people able to help would vary.

      • vinay_clubsall@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        Do you have any idea of the timeframe when you’ll be able to open source the project?

        I replied in the other thread, copy pasting here: Open sourcing is not time dependent. I just need

        1. security review by someone experienced to make sure we do not instantly get hacked as soon as we open
        2. and some commitment to fix critical bugs and hacks that will kill ClubsAll or steal resources

        what are the languages used to develop ClubsAll Ah, good question. It is typescript, next, React, Cloudflare

        • BlazeEnglish
          3·
          4 days ago

          Thank you for coming back

          security review by someone experienced to make sure we do not instantly get hacked as soon as we open

          The source not being open will not prevent attackers from trying to hack your website as it currently online.

          If you need help with having a look at the code, you can probably reach out to people here. You might want to shut the website down during the review so that if an issue is discovered it won’t be exploited.

          It is typescript, next, React, Cloudflare

          Interesting, those are all front-end languages. Do you know which one was used for the back-end?

  • vinay_clubsall@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    4 days ago

    Question for everyone here, how is everyone paying for hosting and development costs? While profit is not my motive, break even is needed for long term sustainability.

  • BlazeEnglish
    13·
    6 days ago

    With their simplified communities, ClubsAll takes in posts from multiple communities from Lemmy, PieFed and Mbin, and brands them under a single club. This does solve a practical problem, namely that communities can get split over multiple servers, creating duplicates without a clear distinction between the different communities. It is unclear what the practical difference is between the fediverse community on lemmy.ml and the fediverse community on lemmy.world. PieFed solves this problem by having both communities (similar to Lemmy), as well as ‘topics’, which aggregates different communities into a single topic. PieFed makes it explicit that it aggregates posts from multiple communities. ClubsAll however, mostly hides this information, making it less clear that posts come from different platforms. I’m curious to see what the response to this by the community will be, as there are no clear norms so far on what is an acceptable use of federation, and what isn’t. When you take in posts from a different platform, what form of attribution is necessary? ClubsAll clearly attributes the original author, but should the original community also be accredited? The answer is unclear to me, and I’m watching to see how this evolves.

    I can for sure tell you that !politics@lemmy.world and !politics@lemmy.ml are definitely not the same communities, and hiding that might give users some surprises

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    11·
    6 days ago

    I think it’ll be hard to be successful with that. Lemmy’s userbase is small and not growing. Projects like KBin died. And we already have several frontends. Now someone introduces yet another one, just that it’s not open source, not actively developed unless they pay a developer to fix something. It doesn’t have a community yet. And I don’t see any significant features that’d attract 100k new users or something. They don’t seem to be invested for the same reasons the existing Lemmy community mingles here. And they’re not eating their own dogfood but rather discussing it on Reddit… So maybe they’re good at marketing? I think that’d be the only reason why something like this would take off and be successful.

    • BlazeEnglish
      6·
      6 days ago

      They might be blocking it so that their users would stay on clubsall.

      Like a very early user retention mechanism

      • cabbage@piefed.social
        4·
        6 days ago

        I would guess it’s rather just not implemented as a feature yet, as it’s probably not a development priority.

        Or maybe they figured the ClubAll-community could be closed off. But in general, it seems to be a project where missing features is the likely result of it still being at an early stage.

    • Andrew@piefed.social
      4·
      6 days ago

      If you query it like a federated platform would, it returns HTML rather than the required JSON, so links like that won’t work.

      curl --header 'accept: application/activity+json' --location https://clubsall.com/c/ClubsAll

  • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.mlEnglish
    10·
    6 days ago

    From a entrepreneur point of view, this looks like a clear monetization attempt. Gather content from federated communities, sell to investors on the name “fediverse”. B2C is generally very hard to pull off because there’s so much competition so I doubt they’ll succeed, but there is that saying about seeing what sticks on the wall.

    Also, from both a user and entrepreneur point of view, you need to break into markets by starting small. The fediverse heavily leveraged the open source community to get started. I personally would not be on Lemmy if Lemmy wasn’t AGPL. ClubsAll doesn’t have that.

    With no ill intent, I hope they fail. They’re not contributing, and we don’t need proprietary cancer in the fediverse.

    • BlazeEnglish
      8·
      6 days ago

      With no ill intent, I hope they fail. They’re not contributing, and we don’t need proprietary cancer in the fediverse.

      Personally, I hope they open source, because the interface is visually appealing and quite fast.

      What I expect is most instances defederating from them soon, killing the product in the process.

      • cabbage@piefed.social
        6·
        6 days ago

        Any reason why they should be defederated, other than “we don’t like closed source around here”?

        I really don’t mind closed platforms being federated as long as it doesn’t hurt the rest of us in any way. If it brings in some users who are drawn in by the interface, that’s great.

        Of course, being a single site it might draw the wrong crowd, and end up having serious moderation problems. In that case of course defederation is a natural choice.

        • BlazeEnglish
          5·
          6 days ago

          Based on another comment, they are not federating their communities to the other Lemmy instances.

          They might be blocking this as a way to keep their future users on their site rather than allow them to instance jump.

          • cabbage@piefed.social
            2·
            6 days ago

            I don’t think this will be much of a problem for the rest of us, as the users over there will also not be interested in posting in communities where they get fewer interactions. It sounds bad for people who want to start a community at cluball, but unless it somehow gets larger than the rest of the threadiverse combined it’s not really much of a problem for the rest of us.

            • BlazeEnglish
              5·
              6 days ago

              Not being able to host your own ClubsAll instance is another issue.

              Let’s take a hypothetical scenario

              • As they are on ProductHunt, they manage to raise a few millions, hire devs, develop every feature you can think about under the sun
              • Fediverse users move massively to ClubsAll to enjoy the new features, Redditors move too because it’s better than Reddit
              • Over time, due to those new features and other “technical reasons”, federation with Lemmy and others becomes clunky, or completely stops
              • Meta / Google / Reddit buys ClubsAll and start to look how to extract a profit from the large userbase, enshittifies the mobile app, the web interface, etc.

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

    • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.mlEnglish
      11·
      6 days ago

      Reddit thread paints a sad picture. Product founder without a technical co-founder. Isn’t able to articulate market fit. Doesn’t trust his engineer’s work. Yikes

    • squirrel@discuss.tchncs.deOPEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      I don’t think it’s censorship necessarily. Their approach to combine similar communities into one club could be the cause and maybe they just haven’t set up the c/fediverse club yet.