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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] vinay_clubsall 5 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] vinay_clubsall 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Do you have any idea of the timeframe when you’ll be able to open source the project?

I replied in the other thread, copy pasting here: Open sourcing is not time dependent. I just need

security review by someone experienced to make sure we do not instantly get hacked as soon as we open
and some commitment to fix critical bugs and hacks that will kill ClubsAll or steal resources

what are the languages used to develop ClubsAll Ah, good question. It is typescript, next, React, Cloudflare

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Thank you for coming back

security review by someone experienced to make sure we do not instantly get hacked as soon as we open

The source not being open will not prevent attackers from trying to hack your website as it currently online.

If you need help with having a look at the code, you can probably reach out to people here. You might want to shut the website down during the review so that if an issue is discovered it won't be exploited.

It is typescript, next, React, Cloudflare

Interesting, those are all front-end languages. Do you know which one was used for the back-end?