When the OP was initially made, I actually did end up adding clubsall to the defed. list, but I feel like I might have done that prematurely. I took a brief look at the Clubsall website, and I couldn’t really tell that there was anything inherently evil about it. Sure, the usernames and community names don’t display the server they come from, but I feel like that’s more of a frontend/design decision (any Lemmy frontend or app could do the same), and if you hover over the names on desktop (or click on them), you can see the URL still has the instance of the users and communities. Maybe that’s a good idea for a setting that could be added, where the user can toggle whether the username or community domain is displayed or not.

Yes, there are still many improvements to be made, such as a link back to the original user on their instance would be nice, federation support needs to be worked on, and probably much more. And I will admit, the fact that they don’t currently have a developer doesn’t bode well in fixing some of these issues, but I feel like if we are going to block them, we should come up with some definitive reason, and have it defined in our kbin.earth rules list. If we block clubsall for being closed source and having incomplete federation, then we would need to block threads.net as well (for the same reasons). At the moment, neither of those two technically break our rules; if we were to block them, we would need to make a decision as an instance to add another rule.

The clubsall creator already made a comment in the OP stating that the open sourcing and federation issues were being worked on. I know @vinay_clubsall@lemmy.world isn’t the developer, but maybe he would have some sort of explanation for the additional subdomains that are being used for federation, which appear to be used to dodge defederation (I haven’t personally experienced this though). I try not to assume the worse in a situation, so I’d like to give Clubsall the benefit of the doubt. However, if it is found that they have evil intentions (such as dodging defederation), then I will definitely reblock the domain.

Yes, more contributors would be great!

Piefed just needs an api, then we can add supoort as app developers.