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.

  • vinay_clubsall@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    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

    Homepage should be based on communities with maximum subscribers. But with a login, each user can subscriber/unsubscribe and create their custom homepage. Yes, once we have some stability and traffic, we should publish these choices we made for transparency.

    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.

    Obfuscation was not the objective. Now after many complained, you can see real username and servername on each post.

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

    That is not my vision and I am ok if users decide this is not what they want and adoption fails.