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.

    • Blaze (he/him)English
      6•2 months ago

      They might be blocking it so that their users would stay on clubsall.

      Like a very early user retention mechanism

      • cabbage
        4•2 months ago

        I would guess it’s rather just not implemented as a feature yet, as it’s probably not a development priority.

        Or maybe they figured the ClubAll-community could be closed off. But in general, it seems to be a project where missing features is the likely result of it still being at an early stage.

    • Andrew
      4•2 months ago

      If you query it like a federated platform would, it returns HTML rather than the required JSON, so links like that won’t work.

      curl --header 'accept: application/activity+json' --location https://clubsall.com/c/ClubsAll