For additional context:

• reddit.com/comments/1fz55mo/comment/lqyx3n7
• clubsall.com/about

Seems a bit weird indeed, especially the closed source part and lack of details on how they implement federation (is it possible to follow a clubsall community from elsewhere?)

With their simplified communities, ClubsAll takes in posts from multiple communities from Lemmy, PieFed and Mbin, and brands them under a single club. This does solve a practical problem, namely that communities can get split over multiple servers, creating duplicates without a clear distinction between the different communities. It is unclear what the practical difference is between the fediverse community on lemmy.ml and the fediverse community on lemmy.world. PieFed solves this problem by having both communities (similar to Lemmy), as well as ‘topics’, which aggregates different communities into a single topic. PieFed makes it explicit that it aggregates posts from multiple communities. ClubsAll however, mostly hides this information, making it less clear that posts come from different platforms. I’m curious to see what the response to this by the community will be, as there are no clear norms so far on what is an acceptable use of federation, and what isn’t. When you take in posts from a different platform, what form of attribution is necessary? ClubsAll clearly attributes the original author, but should the original community also be accredited? The answer is unclear to me, and I’m watching to see how this evolves.

I can for sure tell you that !politics@lemmy.world and !politics@lemmy.ml are definitely not the same communities, and hiding that might give users some surprises

From a entrepreneur point of view, this looks like a clear monetization attempt. Gather content from federated communities, sell to investors on the name “fediverse”. B2C is generally very hard to pull off because there’s so much competition so I doubt they’ll succeed, but there is that saying about seeing what sticks on the wall.

Also, from both a user and entrepreneur point of view, you need to break into markets by starting small. The fediverse heavily leveraged the open source community to get started. I personally would not be on Lemmy if Lemmy wasn’t AGPL. ClubsAll doesn’t have that.

With no ill intent, I hope they fail. They’re not contributing, and we don’t need proprietary cancer in the fediverse.

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It also doesn’t seem to federate their own communities to lemmy.

(Unless I’m doing it wrong, !clubsall@clubsall.com should work right?)

I think it'll be hard to be successful with that. Lemmy's userbase is small and not growing. Projects like KBin died. And we already have several frontends. Now someone introduces yet another one, just that it's not open source, not actively developed unless they pay a developer to fix something. It doesn't have a community yet. And I don't see any significant features that'd attract 100k new users or something. They don't seem to be invested for the same reasons the existing Lemmy community mingles here. And they're not eating their own dogfood but rather discussing it on Reddit... So maybe they're good at marketing? I think that'd be the only reason why something like this would take off and be successful.

Also noted clubsall.com/c/fediverse gives a 404, hiding posts such as the one we’re in. Very early censorship?

clubsall.com/…/celebrities-will-never-adopt-the-f…

Well I left a comment on their site about this thread, it will be interesting to see what happens clubsall.com/…/we-are-excited-to-announce-the-lau…

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.

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.

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.