Hello, sh.itjust.works community. I am curious what you think about ClubsAll, and whether you think we should stay federated with them. A few other Lemmy instances have recently defederated so this seems like a timely topic for discussion.

In short, ClubsAll is an ActivityPub-compatible Reddit clone. The site currently has one-way federation with no attribution: ClubsAll pulls content from Lemmy and displays it as local ClubsAll content. For example, you can visit https://clubsall.com/c/196 and there is no indication that the content is from https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/196.

Here are relevant posts with more information and context:

In the first post the ClubsAll founder commented that they plan to eventually have two-way federation, and to make the project open source. Whether those things actually happens is anyone’s guess.

What do you think?

  • kersploosh@sh.itjust.worksOP
    0·
    10 days ago

    I will leave my personal opinions down here in the comments.

    On one hand, no harm is being done. It’s possible this is a temporary situation due to ClubsAll being young and in development. Also, all our data on Lemmy is public anyway; we cannot stop others from scraping it.

    On the other hand, on principle I don’t like one-way interaction and the way ClubsAll presents Lemmy content as their own. It feels deceptive. Defederation would be a symbolic way to protest that behavior.

    I am torn. At the moment I am slightly in favor of defederation.

    • BillibusMaximus@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      10 days ago

      I’ve been around the block a few times, so maybe I’m just jaded.

      My take is that it’s a proprietary platform, siphoning user data/content to redisplay and monetize.

      Additionally, my gut feeling is that they don’t care about the community at all, and are just trying to leverage it to make money. They want to be the next reddit, and think the fediverse is their ticket. And I don’t think anything I’ve seen so far indicates otherwise.

      We block Threads, and I think we should block this, too, immediately. If, in the future, the situation changes and they actually “give and take” rather than just “take” , then it should be simple enough to refederate.

      My 2c.

      • baggachipz@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        9 days ago

        If I wanted to start another Reddit, this is what I would do. Hell, siphoning content from Reddit is still done in many places on Lemmy to stock the pond. In this case, we have the opportunity to stop it before a competing platform takes off. If they’re not going to play by the rules of federation, they don’t deserve the bounty.

    • enkers@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      10 days ago

      How about giving some leeway if they have indicated the intent to fully federate? Say, if they don’t support bidirectional federation with 6 months (?), they will be defederated provisionally until they do. That way, we’re still taking their declared intent in good faith, but not being a pushover.