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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
