Selfhosted

Partial agreement. My personal stance - it's a bit like porn. Hard to define but I know it when I see it.

1. first post (ever, anywhere on Lemmy) is an adverting pitch for their brand new project - FAIL
2. zero effort LLM generated blurb, with no human steering - FAIL
3. the post is literally an advertisement and adds nothing else - FAIL
4. the poster does a post and run - FAIL
5. the post is bot-shaped - FAIL
6. poster does not / cannot engage with community - FAIL

The whole thing about paid vs free etc...of course, I prefer FOSS and AGPL, but I don't begrudge anyone trying to recoup costs or keep their source code to themselves. Someone else's software licence shouldn't be a purity test IMESHO

As for the whole AI / non-AI thing...too much of that comes off as performative. I think we can all spot slop, just like we can all spot email spam. In 2026, I assume you used AI to help...and you can assume (if I am interested in your project) I will use AI to spelunk your code base (initially) for borks, then dive particulars.

Ban 'em

LOVE the discussion folks, and @breadsmasher@lemmy.world you beat me to it, this has been bothering me all week.

I would love to see a consensus come out of this, maybe do a vote on wording/requirements? Idk, still working on figuring out the best approach.

Just a thanks for exactly the meta threads I hoped for.

As I'm doing things right now, closed source, paid, and the only thing posted is getting removed as spam. Unfortunately a common time seems to be about 7am GMT (side note - folks who are on around that time and can help with modding then, please reach out) and I'm not on for a good few hours at a minimum.

That said, I always read and check, sometimes deferring to read again and check the profile when I have more time later.

What I'm looking for at the moment is:

• Are people asking questions to see if this is crap being peddled for a profit? Is OP answering? (And thanks again to the folks who do follow up with great questions that dig into this right away)
• Does it read like a post from a person?
• How old is the account?
• How many other posts have they made? Where and what about?

That kind of stuff. Sometimes its super easy to spot (3 posts, same title, price and it being cloud only, etc), sometimes its not and takes more looking.

I think paid products can have a place here, despite them not being my kind of thing, but more as a discussion.

So if there is some degree of consensus on a good rule, I would suggest making a post about it so we can finalize, like I did for the rule 3 updates.

And if anyone has an idea on a useful option for a voting style solution for things like this, I'd love for a DM so I can check it out.

This is the selfhosted community. Not the Free, Open Source community.

I think you can infer the rules from the name here. The stuff you post must be related to software you can host on your own hardware. It need not be free, nor open source.

Now your point about spam from brand new accounts that are literally just ads on the other hand is valid.

I think new accounts that show up to shil their app should be banned. They're not actively participating in the community, it's just spam. There's been a huge uptick recently.

I think its funny that anyone who has closed source software thinks the best place to advertise it is in the federation. I love the fediverse but if it was the fact that it was gnu that I checked it out. I would totally not be here if it was closed source.

At it's heart, this is what @selfhosted is meant for:

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

I would say that members talking about paid/closed products they use (ex. "I connect to this via Tailscale" or "I use company ABC for hosted VPS") to accomplish something is fine, but marketing or job boarding (ex. "Looking for QA on my commercial product") is not.

if they are obviously bot or dedicated marketing accounts, then no I dont think they should be here.

However, I'm not 100% opposed to closed source/paid software being discussed here, but it should clearly marked as such, with a flair that people can filter out if they so choose.

If someone posts asking about whether there are any alternatives to a paid closed source program, that's a totally valid conversation, and if it turns out there is no FOSS alternative, then we have to talk about paid closed alternatives, find the one that offers the best value and vet for trustworthiness.

The rules say nothing about selling a paid service, but maybe "no spam" should be updated with some clarity on self promotion, so perhaps you can self promote your FOSS service with the appropriate flair, but if you are selling a paid closed service it shouldn’t be allowed?

I'm here for genuine interactions with other people. So I'm not a fan of ads from brand new accounts that will never engage with the community or enrich it.

I don't want this community, or any community on Lemmy for that matter, to become a lucrative platform for advertisers. If someone wants to promote their own product that they made, they should have some credibility as a real person beforehand. Not a brand-new account trying to sell a subscription to an app that's essentially still in open beta.

I think they should be allowed. However, I wouldn't even date to touch them with a stick from afar in VR.

Plex was the last proprietary thing I ever selfhosted and it's been a perfect reminder.

I selfhost because I want to be in control of my data and own it. Closed software is the antithesis of that. They're just bots trying to advertise their software.

Advertised? I'd vote no. Discussed? I'm all for it.

On reddit, there is a community called r/progressionfantasy, which is about a specific type of fantasy fiction. They have a rule that self promotional posts (for paid books) must be preceeded by 10 comments, and actual engagement with the community.

This is a reasonable compromise, in my opinion. Known community member who has been answering questions and contributiting to discussions?

I would be okay if they dropped a paid product of good quality and with a reasonable business model (please no vibecoded slop).

But drive by ProductNameAccount users who have never posted on lemmy before a bunch of self promotional posts? Yeah ban that shit.

I don't really use this community, but I ban a lot of accounts that talk like an AI, use em dashes excessively, and come to this community to promote "their" projects. 🤔

No. They should not be allowed, especially the closed source, non-FOSS ones. It'd be one thing to have a FOSS application that has a premium option (such as Frigate), but if it's closed source and you have to pay, they shouldn't be in the self hosting community.

If their first interaction with a community is to try to sell their shit, i don't think they're gonna be welcome anywhere

I don't think "selfhosting" and "paid for" goes hand in hand because, at the end of the day, the application somehow will still contact some authentication server or some similar bullshit. That's the contrary of what most people want from selfhosting.

I think this community should stick to actual OSS, free applications, not some semi-corporate bullshit.

Ban advertising!

While I'm fine with people wanting to self-host stuff with closed software (this includes Windows and Plex, btw), I personally am not interested in having ads of any kind in the community.

To me self hosting is about controlling your data. While I wouldn't use proprietary software myself for this, I just want to make it clear that I'm fine with people asking for help it advice about it. Just not ads, of any kind.