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.

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    Looking forward to the sublinks migration, I know a lot of people were looking into it for when it becomes ready!

    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.

    Well rather, how will you pick which communities go in that feed? It’s not a bad plan, but transparency would encourage your users to use that feed

    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

    With how new fediverse tech is, a lot of new rules will be “written” based on what people try. Obfuscating or misleading people on where content is coming from (which is the concern people are expressing here), seems like something people will push back against.

    A simple toggle would fix this issue

    • show the instances (default)
    • simplify my feed (removes the instances)

    Again, while others may disagree, but are there rules on what not to do?

    Nope, no rules on what not to do. Users and other instances are free to decide which ideas to support.

    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?

    I don’t think any one instance is trying to be the replacement alone? That seems to be a big misunderstanding on what people want from the threadiverse. Despite network effects that limit growth, these instances continue to grow, self sustain from donations and grants, and prove how easy it can be to break away from the model big tech companies have adopted.

    My view is that most people chose to use Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed/Sublinks over the established alternatives (ex. Reddit) because they didn’t like how those alrernatives were being run.

    As such, you might find it easier to build a userbase by avoiding what Reddit has done rather than try to emulate it