Selfhosted

I think 10% self-promotion is a very fair rule. It enforces the idea that if you are going to take from the community that you also give something back.

As someone who is partially self-hosted, I think that will help keep ads from muddying the waters when I'm searching posts for setup suggestions.

Nice to see the changes, but may I ask if tagging could be beneficial?

Surely it would help to sort out self promotion, help requests and informational posts.

Also, since we're all in the lemmy-bubble, a lot of people may despise vibe-coded projects, at least it looks/feels like it, so it may be worth tagging project with AI code?

I'm maybe narrow-minded, but please enlighten me^^

I saw the other thread and decided not to comment because there the conversation was looking pretty contentious, and I didn't want to put a target on my back, but as somebody who almost exclusively posts about my project on Lemmy, I thought that this might be a good opportunity to explain myself.

Due to my project being FOSS, I'm thankful that this 10% rule doesn't apply to me right now because I really don't think I could provide anything useful by spouting my opinions. I do look at questions to see if there's anything I can answer but the community is already great at that and most have more experience and knowledge of hosting infrastructure etc. I don't feel that I have a great deal of insight into what makes for a good self hosting setup, but I have a passion for writing open source software that can be self hosted, and this is the way that I feel I can contribute something meaningful.

I feel that when I post about my project, I am contributing. I'm telling you that it exists, it's free and you're welcome to try or leave it. I do try to keep it relevant so as not to hit anyone over the head with it, and I've put the detailed posts into their own community. Nobody is going to find out that some of these self hosted applications exist if they aren't told about them.

I have opinions, but none of them well enough formed to have suggestions on the new rule.

Try it for a while and see if it works! We know this community ain’t shy about sharing when something isn’t working for them!

Appreciate the clarification and expansion!

I worry a bit that its getting unwieldy, so feel free to suggest options to clean up the language a bit.

I would just keep it simple: "Self promotion for your product is allowed, but this is not an advertising platform. Be sensible and participate to community. Abuse will result in post removal."

I don't think it really helps to place any arbitary limit as it might just result on spamming low-effort comments so that your "quota" stays under the 10% rule and also posting about your fantastic FOSS project daily could be equally annoying. That 10% rule could be useful when deciding if something should be removed and obviously free projects should have more relaxed "limits", but in general what counts as abuse can be decided by community feedback.

I feel that some further refinement is needed. I agree with the sentiment behind the latest version of the rule, but I think it still doesn't address the recent issues.

The way I see it, there is a very specific type of post that has started showing up very recently, and is getting lots of downvotes. Users here are justifiably suspicious of the pattern.

The ones that get downvotes are usually:

• from new accounts
• the user makes one post, and at most they only responds to comments in that one post
• the software uses the help of LLMs, while the post and/or comments are also helped by LLMs
• the software is made to look "professional", whether it is the UI, the demo, or the README

I'm not sure what exactly the end goal is, but I don't believe the story that they all use where they "had this problem and now want to share their solution". I'm concerned that there is some other end goal, whether it is link farming, SEO manipulation, LLM search result manipulation, or it's the setup portion of a cyber attack where questionable code will be added later (if it isn't already).

Normally I would suggest to just moderate it based off of "you know it when you see it", but in this case it's difficult since it's very similar to legitimate posts. There are real users that want to post with a new account, such keeping their professional life separate from their main account. It's also hard to differentiate it based on licenses, because those recent accounts almost always license it as FOSS. I also don't think it's fair to exclude all AI assisted code, since it's very common to have that now.

Perhaps instead of a rule, we could even try some of the following:

• To reduce the risk of OpenClaw style bots creating content here: AI is ok for the code and external text (ex. the README), but the post here should be written by a human. It's not like the post needs to be that long to express why someone should look at it, and it won't go through that many edits. Translations should be done through traditional translation software.
• To prevent driveby posts, we could automate a comment on new posts see if a user knows where they are posting. Asking about their favourite threadiverse community, or how long they have been a member here, or even how they learned about the community might separate bots from real users. It works pretty well for our registration applications on lemmy.ca / piefed.ca etc.

On top of being suspicious, I think it boils down to "projects that have a future" and "projects that don't have a future". People in this community want to run software that is likely to stay useful and safe over time, and that's at the core of why these recent ones are downvoted.

I'm a lurker, I potentially comment but usually there is not much to add when the pros have posted, so if I'd try to promote my secure, takedownsafe P2P sharing protocol (if people started using it, everyone could have a web-space, backups, a "drop-box", an online presence, and more), it'd be kicked?

I'm just trying to understand where I am, the overall rule is completely understandable.

Are Home Assistant and Frigate exempted? Home Assistant is free and open source and you can self host it, but there is a built-in feature where you can pay a subscription to use Nabu Casa's ingress server and cloud GPUs, and many of the integrations are only useful if you have paid money for some piece of hardware or have a subscription to a cloud service. Frigate is free and open source, but it has built-in support for specially packaged computer vision models that are offered for a fee that supports the project. I wouldn't consider either application crippleware, but you can pay money to people who are affiliated with the project for a direct benefit that is related to the software.

The 10% rule is a perfect approach, in my opinion. It would stop the people creating accounts to only promote their projects while also promoting community engagement.

I find this too prohibitive. Even with the exception this would make me think twice about a promo post and maybe even refrain me from posting at all. For non-except services it is even worse. It may lead to spam posts or users trying to categorize contributions into useful and not useful posts.

Self hosting does not end for everyone with free services. Some of us are happy to pay for services provided by others and I would really like to read about these here as well. I know this is not the intention of the rule, but it will be its result.

I do think it makes sense to include an exception for 100% free/libre open source projects.

Here we go again.

Both libre projects and free projects can make money via donation, patreon, or other business models. Allowing them a "vibe check" exception and not closed source or anything in between is propagating this notion that money and open source are mutually exclusive.

I appreciate the effort to establish some rules, but this is further entrenching the Lemmy self-hosting community in a mode where it's a FOSS-only space, which is both uninclusive and inaccurate.

If what you want is a FOSS-only space for self-hosting, I'd like to know that so I can find or start a similar community where ppl who do use closed source tools can post questions.