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.
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.
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.
Sorry you feel that way. Keep in mind that we built everything from scratch. Federation is not currently implemented, and we’ll need time.
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.
This is insightful and another reason for us to prioritize federation.
That’s a valid concern. However, I’ll open source the project once I get some assistance, which should alleviate some of these fears.
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).
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.
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.
There is discussion going around right now about if more instances should defederate from this project. If you have any updates on the points you mentioned above, please do share!
I have some feedback, and I hope it doesn’t come across as being too hostile.
How are you planning to do this in the long run? Hand picking communities will be hard to scale I want to find the communities I like, and I’m not sure I’d like a curated feed like that.
A Lemmy instance doesn’t show content from every other Lemmy instance out there, nor does it pull all communities from federated instances. For example, lemmy.ca doesn’t pull content from every lemmy.world community, only the ones that our users search for and subscribe to. That keeps the server costs low and leaves it up to the users.
If this is a temporary thing for testing, then disregard :)
Having helped some non-technical users get started with the fediverse, it’s not actually that bad. Something like this would be more confusing because now you can’t see where that user or post is coming from. I am otter@lemmy.ca, but there are other people with the username
otter
from other instances. Will we all look like the same user? What about similarly named communities from different places, which don’t actually deal with the same subject matter.Instead, would you consider keeping the servers and instances but making them smaller in the UI? That way it’s not a distraction, but the information is still there.
The problem the fediverse is tackling is centralization, not lack of open source. That’s what the comment was referring to. If the goal of this project is to be a one stop shop for all threadiverse content, you’re not going to find much support here.
Reddit was once open source as well. Having the code available is helpful in some ways, such as by being open about the algorithms used, but it doesn’t solve all problems. Similarly, without a way for others to host the software, it’s hard to tell if that is the actual code running on the live server.
That’s totally ok, the fediverse has many projects like this in various stages of development. The concern expressed in this thread is less about what the project is doing now, and more about clarity on what the future plans are.
For example:
funding through donations instead of paid accounts, advertising, and user data
a confirmation on what kind of federation it will have
Nice comment, not sure they’ll see it however
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.
I replied in the other thread, copy pasting here: Open sourcing is not time dependent. I just need
Thank you for coming back
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.
Interesting, those are all front-end languages. Do you know which one was used for the back-end?