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squirrel @discuss.tchncs.de

Let's talk about ClubsAll

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.

33 comments

  • 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

  • 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.

    • 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.

      • 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.

  • It also doesn't seem to federate their own communities to lemmy.

    (Unless I'm doing it wrong, !clubsall@clubsall.com should work right?)

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

      Like a very early user retention mechanism

      • 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.

    • 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

  • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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 otter@lemmy.ca, 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

      • Nice comment, not sure they'll see it however

      • Sorry for late reply.

        I posted update elsewhere but here it is again

        1. After some discussion with another fediverse developer, he recommended we move to sublinks library. I posted our tech plans here https://lemmy.world/comment/12922172. This will achieve a number of things - move db to postgres, deployment to docker/k8s, enable lemmy clients, make some security changes so our passwords are not exposed, this in turn will enable open sourcing and self hosting. This seems the best path forward.

        2. We almost completed the move when we found out that sublinks library itself does not have federation implemented. I was told it will be picked up in 2025 but it is also being developer by volunteers, so the timeline is not certain. Since we almost finished move to sublinks, as soon as they have federation, we should be able to move very quickly since work on our side is mostly done.

        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.

        Core idea is to create a frontend for simple users who do not want to learn about servers and navigation to use a product. So we are starting with curated feed, once we have traffic, we can add features for advanced users to let users pick any community from any server.

        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. A lot of people mentioned it this time around. So we will show the instance name along with username i.e. change from /u/otter to /u/otter@lemmy.ca . This should be live before 2025. Hope this addresses your concern.

        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.

        Understood. Not everyone has to or will agree with what others are doing. I am trying something different. I am only asking for not enforcing undocumented rules too hard until we have some minimum traffic like let's say 100 active users in a month (can be easily seen by who makes comments, Comments are federated). That should be reasonable to say "now you have some traction, do participate in community"

        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

        It will have 2 way federation. As for funding, I am myself not sure, we have to try something different, whatever works. Again, while others may disagree, but are there rules on what not to do? What I see is that donation approach alone has not generated enough money for any server to be a real competitor. So are others free to try other things?

33 comments