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.
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.
