Discussion about ClubsAll

Hello, sh.itjust.works community. I am curious what you think about ClubsAll, and whether you think we should stay federated with them. A few other Lemmy instances have recently defederated so this seems like a timely topic for discussion.

In short, ClubsAll is an ActivityPub-compatible Reddit clone. The site currently has one-way federation with no attribution: ClubsAll pulls content from Lemmy and displays it as local ClubsAll content. For example, you can visit https://clubsall.com/c/196 and there is no indication that the content is from https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/196.

Here are relevant posts with more information and context:

General discussion: Let's talk about ClubsAll (the ClubsAll founder left comments in this post)
Recent update to that general discussion: As a reminder, ClubsAll is still showing all of Lemmy's content without federating back

In the first post the ClubsAll founder commented that they plan to eventually have two-way federation, and to make the project open source. Whether those things actually happens is anyone's guess.

What do you think?

31 comments

I don't want to strangle anyone's project in the crib, but it needs post attribution at the very least. I can understand it being a project in the early stages, but it's not hard to include info on the source of the posts.
However, if they had that but weren't yet open source and had only one-way federation, I would be open to giving them a date to hit for those. I don't like the idea of one-way federation, nor of federation with a closed-source project, but to take the dev at face value and allow them a time frame of 6 months or so to clear it up would be acceptable.
All that being said, as it stands now I would vote to defederate due to the lack of attribution. It is the very least that could be done and shouldn't be hard to implement.

I will leave my personal opinions down here in the comments.
On one hand, no harm is being done. It's possible this is a temporary situation due to ClubsAll being young and in development. Also, all our data on Lemmy is public anyway; we cannot stop others from scraping it.
On the other hand, on principle I don't like one-way interaction and the way ClubsAll presents Lemmy content as their own. It feels deceptive. Defederation would be a symbolic way to protest that behavior.
I am torn. At the moment I am slightly in favor of defederation.
- How about giving some leeway if they have indicated the intent to fully federate? Say, if they don't support bidirectional federation with 6 months (?), they will be defederated provisionally until they do. That way, we're still taking their declared intent in good faith, but not being a pushover.
  
  I like this solution.
  
  That seems fair.
  
  Seems reasonable. I don't have any technical complaint with what they're doing, but it feels icky as long as there's no attribution.
  
  I like this. I will put a reminder on my calendar to check on ClubsAll in a few months. If more users complain about it then we can reconsider the approach.
  
  Thank you. I request the defederation being traffic based rather than time based. Would that be fair?
- I've been around the block a few times, so maybe I'm just jaded.
  My take is that it's a proprietary platform, siphoning user data/content to redisplay and monetize.
  Additionally, my gut feeling is that they don't care about the community at all, and are just trying to leverage it to make money. They want to be the next reddit, and think the fediverse is their ticket. And I don't think anything I've seen so far indicates otherwise.
  We block Threads, and I think we should block this, too, immediately. If, in the future, the situation changes and they actually "give and take" rather than just "take" , then it should be simple enough to refederate.
  My 2c.
  
  If I wanted to start another Reddit, this is what I would do. Hell, siphoning content from Reddit is still done in many places on Lemmy to stock the pond. In this case, we have the opportunity to stop it before a competing platform takes off. If they’re not going to play by the rules of federation, they don’t deserve the bounty.
  
  Hi there, I am creator of clubsall. We absolutely do care about community.
  There were many discussion few months ago. There were also private discussions with some admins. Because we are not lemmy based, so our development takes time (plus my developer left, plus we were trying to move to sublinks which itself has federation issues). So federation for us is not a config setting. Also, we are a very niche site with almost no traffic.
  Additionally, different admins feel different rules are fair, so it is hard for us to know how to be good community members. I request a common set of rules, preferably based on traffic, so any newbie can get the breathing room to develop and participate. Does that sound fair?
- Hi there, I am creator of clubsall.
  Please see my updates. We are not intentionally blocking federation, we just do not have that capability (as we are not a lemmy instance). So I am requesting common fair set of rules, so I can save clubsall.
- I agree with this opinion. Do what you gotta do.
  
  Please see my updates. Let me know if my proposal is fair.

Personally, I'm not too opposed to one-way federation, at least for the moment. They're not a large platform, nor particularly competitve with the more open Fediverse (for the moment). The lack of attribution on the other hand, is iffy, both in terms of giving OC creators proper attribution for their work, and in terms of reducing misinformation (IE showing .ml posts as standard news posts).
All that said, I don't think its a large enough issue to be concerned about for now. Give it like 3-6 months and see if things have changed (or if the problem has disappeared). This isn't like Threads where we have to worry about a billion dollar Embrace Extend Extinguish campaign. Who knows, if we're esspecially lucky, the site might grow into a better Fediverse alternative to Lemmy, or will grow and die in a way that sends positive users our way - something that would greatly benifit the Fediverse in it's current state.
- I am the creator of ClubsAll. Thank you for very well thought out and objective post. I am absolutely 110% hoping to create a better Fediverse alternative to lemmy.
  While I am doing that, community support is highly appreciated. Thank you again.

ClubsAll is an ActivityPub-compatible Reddit clone.
Uh… I thought that’s what I’m on right now

One issue with the lack of attribution with canonical tags is it could break SEO, if that matters to you.
- I am creator of ClubsAll, can you ELI5 this to me. What is attribution with canonical tags and how does that break SEO for others?
  
  I'm on my phone at the moment, but this explains it pretty well https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1418
  Basically without it Google could either down rank both versions as duplicates, or find your version first and assume it's the original.

31 comments