Yes I am aware, that is why our progress has stopped. I was told they will pickup again in new year.

I just did not know about pyfedi, I will look into it. We have about 10 users in last month.

Yes this is easy to implement. While I do not fully agree because impersonation can still be done by using username Bytes0nBikes. I feel showing instance names adds complexity for the user and it does not fully address impersonation anyways.

But then again, even though I disagree, many people mentioned that lack of attribution bothers them. So I should take feedback and get this done. I hope this is what everyone meant and they will accept this as a solution.

This is rather easier to implement. I should be able to get this done rather quickly. I will try to do this before end of Dec.

I mean this library https://github.com/sublinks/sublinks-api

We have a handful of users. Their comments are being federated. They are not making any posts (because without federation there are no replies). Defederation will mean users cannot even comment and will have to abandon ClubsAll. A site being abandoned at this early stage usually means death of site, which I would like to avoid if possible.

Thank you for responding. Here are my plans

1. After some discussion with another fediverse developer, he recommended we move to sublinks library. I posted our tech plans here https://lemmy.world/comment/12922172. This will achieve a number of things - move db to postgres, deployment to docker/k8s, enable lemmy clients, make some security changes so our passwords are not exposed, this in turn will enable open sourcing and self hosting. This seems the best path forward.
2. We almost completed the move when we found out that sublinks library itself does not have federation implemented. I was told it will be picked up in 2025 but it is also being developer by volunteers, so the timeline is not certain. Since we almost finished move to sublinks, as soon as they have federation, we should be able to move very quickly since work on our side is mostly done.

There is almost no traffic today, users are not missing out on any content. Since the timelines are not in my hands, my ask is for admins to give me benefit of doubt and be patient until I wait for sublinks federation implementation (or if clubsall have traffic in which case, users will be missing out on content. In that case, I will have to think of something else)

3. In the long run, idea is to have an simplified fediverse frontend that can realistically be a real open alternative to reddit.

Feel free to ask me anything else.

That is fair to say. We are not trying to have it both ways, just need time to get there. We started with moving to sublinks library. This seems to be the best path forward, but timelines got extended after we found out that federation out is also under development there as well.

Thank you, this is fair. I can explain subdomains. As far as I know, my developer used some subdomains while developing (and trying to understand and make federation working), but eventually settled on api.clubsall.com (he wasnt able to get clubsall.com working). So as of last few months, only domain being used should be api.clubsall.com. If that is not true, do bring that to my attention please.

The issue is that definition of “finish” varies person to person. This is why I am asking for a common set of fair rules we can agree on, so we can finish.

I just checked, the homepage of Clubsall shows content from !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone, while lemmy.blahaj.zone have you defederated: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/instances, as “clubsall.com” is in the blocked instances. But if we look at the linked instances, there is now “api.clubsall.com” and “clubsall-api4.renchesterjramos.workers.dev”

This is because federation is fairly complex and we are new to this and do not fully understand. I really do not know why we are getting content from lemmy.blahaj.zone when they have blocked us. The content is coming from federation, so how is it being pushed to clubsall after blocking?

You are channeling the traffic from 44k monthly active users to your website without giving credit to the instances where the content is created. In our last discussion, you said “your site is small, so people just ignore it. Should it become more active, then users are probably going to call their admins to defederate.” ClubsAll has not grown. This time you are saying we are not attributing. It seems even you change mind on to what is fair.

My request stays the same, give us some breathing room until some traffic threshold. Is that fair?

Thanks for this. My worry is that other admins have different set of rules. Someone said clubsall should be open sourced, someone said clubsall should be self hostable, another person said, it should attribute posts and have canonical links. Unfortunately the admins do not seem to have common agreed set of rules that are fair. So no matter what we do, it seems we will be blocked. Can we have a viable alternative?

There was a discussion about having a common set of rules which had proposal which is different than yours. So I am requesting some breathing room exception based on traffic, so we can survive until we can develop more or there is a common set of rules agreed to. Would that be fair?

Hello there, I am the creator of clubsall. We are not in a hurry. In fact as stated, my developer has left, that has halted our development. Also, we are a very small site with < 10 comments a month and I believe 0 posts. So federation will hardly help everyone. Still we want to implement federation, please read my update above.

My request is to agree on common and fair rules so we can be seen as upstanding community participants.

Hi there, I am creator of clubsall. There are a lot of adhoc discussions and rules. Some discussions such as this one does skip my notice too. So it has been very difficult to be fair and run a new instance. It seems anyone trying to build a lemmy competitor is being killed. If that is the rule, lets state that and I will kill clubsall myself.

If not, can I request a discussion or at least a set of rules that we should comply to so I can save clubsall?

@snowe@programming.dev @Ategon@programming.dev @mp3@lemmy.ca @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone

Hello @haverholm@kbin.earth and @jwr1@kbin.earth I am the creator of Clubsall. Please see my update above. Based on previous discussion, I was under the impression that until there is meaningful traffic, it is ok to give us time to implement federation. There were a set of rules proposed in another thread. However, seems like the rules were not finalized or not accepted or not distributed. If those rules are not acceptable, can we have a discussion first so we can agree what is fair and I have a chance to save clubsall?

Hello Blaze,

One request, whenever you post about clubsall, can you please tag me so I can also participate? Thank you.

As for this discussion, when we had a discussion last time on reddit, I thought we agreed that as long as there is not meaningful traffic, it should be ok. I guess you were not fully onboard with this.

My request with all admins is - can we agree on some rules. If we block all new sites on hunch or rules as we make up, it will kill anyone trying to do something new.

There was another thread (that I cannot find now) where some rules were proposed. (If someone can find, please reply to this).

There are 2 things being discussed

1. federating out
2. open sourcing clubsall

I can give an update on both of these. As I mentioned previously, someone was helping me in doing some audit, implementing federation and then we could also open source. We were going to use “sublinks”, which would do a number of upgrades. So that seems the right choice moving forward. It will allow self hosting, federation, move to postgres, move to docker etc.

However during implementation we found that sublinks itself does not implement federation out. So we were blocked by that. I checked with developer just few days ago and I was told that since all developers are volunteers and they got busy, federation was delayed. The work will pickup again in new year.

I am not sure when they will be able to finish federation. I can quickly move there once done. However that seems months away.

In the meantime, can we have a discussion about a set of rules for clarification and fairness?

Update on this request: A developer approached me and is not only helping me with review and fix security issues. We found quite concerning security issues, so I think the decision to have another person look at this was right one.

We discussed and found that we need to do following work

1. Redo backend/api so it is more robust, while doing that it will also become Lemmy API compatible
2. Fix client so it adapt to any API changes
3. Move from cloudflare workers to docker, so it can be self hosted
4. Move from D1 to postgres (D1 has 10GB limit, ClubsAll db is already 5GB), so it is scalable
5. Move production to a VM or k8s cluster so we can host our own DB, backend and frontend instead of CF workers

We have some work to do but will have a good product at the end of it. We will update further once we get this work done. Thanks to everyone to your thoughts and offers to help.

Question for everyone here, how is everyone paying for hosting and development costs? While profit is not my motive, break even is needed for long term sustainability.

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

1. security review by someone experienced to make sure we do not instantly get hacked as soon as we open
2. 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

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.