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.
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
Absolutely.
My post now federated to ClubsAll, comments seem to federate a little slower. There is no mention that this is content from lemmy.world and clicking on the fediverse “club” just gives a 404.
They don’t seem to federate with lemmy.ml since no comments from @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml are visible on ClubsAll.
Curious because they are federated with the instance: https://lemmy.ml/instances
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.
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 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.
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
https://clubsall.com/c/ClubsAll doesnt federate too.
Ah ok, gotcha. nvm.
For additional context:
Seems a bit weird indeed, especially the closed source part and lack of details on how they implement federation (is it possible to follow a clubsall community from elsewhere?)
