Hi everyone, I’m Vinay, the founder of ClubsAll. I’m happy to answer any questions and would like to address where I think ClubsAll might be misunderstood.

“I think it’s unfair for them to federate all our posts and comments, making their platform seem busy, while they don’t allow federation of their own content or self-hosting.”

I completely agree with this concern. However, it’s important to note that ClubsAll is still in its infancy. We currently have around 10 upvotes on Product Hunt, with a nearly non-existent active user base or content. So even if we implement federation, the activity level would be minimal for now.

“We could establish a federation policy across instances, ensuring no single-direction federation of content.”

This proposal seems fair. I’d like to suggest an additional condition: “No single-direction federation of content once an instance reaches a certain level of activity, say, X posts per day.”
The reasoning here is that new and small instances like ClubsAll need time to grow and develop their features before being subjected to such rules. This approach ensures that very young instances aren’t immediately blocked, especially when they might not have much content anyway.

There’s also been talk about defederation. I want to be transparent – ClubsAll is bootstrapped and we have invested a lot of money and sweat to help the community. Right now even my developer has moved on, so new development has halted. This is why I was forced to launch.

If the community chooses to turn against ClubsAll, it won’t survive. That said, I’ll leave the decision to you. Defederation would immediately kill it. If defederation is the path chosen, then so be it.