Sorry for late reply.

I posted update elsewhere but here it is again

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. ========================

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.

Core idea is to create a frontend for simple users who do not want to learn about servers and navigation to use a product. So we are starting with curated feed, once we have traffic, we can add features for advanced users to let users pick any community from any server.

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. A lot of people mentioned it this time around. So we will show the instance name along with username i.e. change from /u/otter to /u/[email protected] . This should be live before 2025. Hope this addresses your concern.

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.

Understood. Not everyone has to or will agree with what others are doing. I am trying something different. I am only asking for not enforcing undocumented rules too hard until we have some minimum traffic like let’s say 100 active users in a month (can be easily seen by who makes comments, Comments are federated). That should be reasonable to say “now you have some traction, do participate in community”

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

It will have 2 way federation. As for funding, I am myself not sure, we have to try something different, whatever works. Again, while others may disagree, but are there rules on what not to do? What I see is that donation approach alone has not generated enough money for any server to be a real competitor. So are others free to try other things?

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.

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.

I just checked, the homepage of Clubsall shows content from [email protected], 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?

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?

Typescript, Next, Cloudflare

I think lemmy left a lot to be desired.

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.