from curbstickle@anarchist.nexus to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 22 Jun 17:47
https://anarchist.nexus/c/selfhosted/p/746919/rule-2-clarifications-and-new-rule-proposal
Edit 3 - further refining.
There are some rather… unique interpretations of what a promo post is, along with an important note that some people lurk. Its important though that they participate somewhere to make sure its not a drive-by ad, but its fair to say that there are users in programming, linux, and other communities whose posts would be welcomed by users here.
Its also important to users here that its not just post and disappear.
So I’m adjusting to:
Promotion posts require your active participation in selfhosting or related communities, or the post will be removed. No more than 10% of your posts or comments may be self-promotional, or your post will be removed. F/LOSS Exception: If your post is about a project that is completely open source & can be self-hosted in full without payment, your post is exempt from this rule as long as you continue to engage in comments.
EDIT 2 AT THE TOP AGAIN:
It seems there is some confusion around the term “promo posts”, so I’m making another adjustment for clarity. If this is muddying the waters instead, please point that out!
Self-promotion posts advertising their product requires community participation, or they will be removed. No more than 10% of your posts or comments may be self-promotional, or your post will be removed. F/LOSS Exception: If your post is about a project that is completely open source & can be self-hosted in full without payment, your post is exempt from this rule.
I worry a bit that its getting unwieldy, so feel free to suggest options to clean up the language a bit.
EDIT AT THE TOP:
Promotional posts require community participation or they will be removed. No more than 10% of your posts or comments may be self-promotional, or your post will be removed. F/LOSS Exception: If your post is about a project that is completely open source & can be used in full without payment, it will be exempt from this rule.
Intended to clarify on “paywall” - it has to be open source and run in full locally, no one-time or subscription-locked payment for features, to qualify. Donations don’t count as that doesn’t limit use, while something like Kavita (which has non-free features behind a subscription, despite the base being open source) would not have the benefit of exemption. The rule intent hasn’t changed here, just the wording on the exemption limitations.
I’ve gotten through (I believe) all the comments in the meta thread. So I want to establish a few things, first being a better definition on spam.
Spam is not “I don’t like this and its a paid product” or “I don’t like this and they used AI/LLMs”.
Spam would generally be considered:
- Mass-posting - Posting the exact same post across a bunch of of different communities, rapidly.
- Repetitive Content (aka karma farming) - repeatedly submitting old popular content. I’ll note that this is completely irrelevant on lemmy, this was more of a reddit issue due to karma.
- Bot Activity / AI Abuse - Using scripts/bots/gen AI to automate posts and comments.
- Unsolicited DMs - Mass private messages or chats to users, completely unsolicited
I’d say anything other than that deserves a followup rule, and this definition should go in the sidebar.
Regarding the promotional posts themselves, I think something like the 10% rule makes sense - no more than 10% of the account should be self-promotional material or comments within the community.
I do think it makes sense to include an exception for 100% free/libre open source projects. Partially open projects with a closed (paid) component should be subject to the 10% rule. So what I propose as the rule would be:
Promotional posts require community participation or they will be removed. No more than 10% of your posts or comments may be self-promotional, or your post will be removed. F/LOSS Exception: If your post is about a project that is completely open source & without any paywalls, it will be exempt from this rule.
Questions, comments, clarifications, and harsh criticisms are welcomed in the comments. As a reminder from my intro post, and because of some comments in the other thread, I will mention:
There are people on both sides of the keyboards, so please be respectful of others.
threaded - newest
Appreciate the clarification and expansion!
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 actually do want tagging of some sort, I think its a sensible approach overall. I think its a quick way to identify that your project used AI and people can quickly filter, per your example.
That said, I think that should be a separate item, and I don’t want to inundate with stickies either. That was going to be my next “oh look a mod is annoying us with his opinion again” post, but then we ended up seeing a ton of promo content this week. I’m trying to stick to a mod post every week or two so everyone has a chance to see and respond to things.
That said, if you want to get that discussion ball rolling, feel free to make a meta post about it of course!
Thanks for your work, time and effort. I also think, it would be better to separate it and first end the discussion about promotions and co, so it could settle before kicking of another round^^
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.
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.
If you think this is about what I want, you haven’t been reading any of my comments.
This comes out of what the community commented in the meta thread, with a bit of my own wording on top to meet the requests.
Also
That isn’t promotional material and would have nothing to do with this rule, so I’m not sure what you’re driving at here.
Thank for the clarification.
I have read them, all of them. Your wording “I think it makes sense to…” suggests you’re making a decision. It seems based on community input, but is nonetheless still your decision. As it should be.
I don’t really have an opinion on the 10% rule, I don’t think anyone can help but make that an arbitrary number.
I do, however, think it’s a mistake to lean heavily toward favoring FOSS here because, as I mentioned, there is nothing preventing FOSS applications from making money. Further, it is very difficult to find software that is 100% FOSS through and through.
Ultimately, the line of what is FOSS and what isn’t is what will become a problem.
I’m taking an amalgam of the comments in the meta thread to rewrite for a singular rule. Of course it has my take in it. Which is why I use the word “proposed” - just like with rule 3 which was the cause of drama a few weeks ago, I put my proposed version out there, it saw some mild revision, now its in place.
I firmly disagree. The work is custodial, not dictatorial.
At which time as it becomes a problem it can be evaluated.
That said, it isn’t hard to check the license being used (or licenses if it ties to multiple models), and the FSF has a great definition of f/loss. Can it meet the requirements to be f/loss and someone still make money? Yes.
Does that make a post about it an ad?
No.
I think that’s the important distinction to make. Maybe get rid of the f/loss exception and explicitly call out the paid aspect. If you’re here to promote software that’s pay walled you get the 10% rule.
ETA: I’m fine with the new rules. Just trying to find common ground.
Just to mention, f/loss with a paywall is not exempt per the rule.
Yeah, I understand that. I was suggesting saying the same thing without the exception wording. In the end, it doesn’t stop us from talking about paid software. I use Plex, etc, etc, it’s the promotion that’s the problem… That being said, maybe I’ve misunderstood non_burglar’s complaint. Unless they are a closed source dev looking to promote.
And it shouldn’t stop any sort of discussion - its the promo thats the issue, exactly.
I’m not sure I understand their complaint either. The first comment was about something not impacted at all by the rule, and the second was about floss being hard to define (its not)? Trying to get clarity here but I think I’m missing something with their concern, I don’t see it.
I’m not, I swear!
Jokes aside, your example of Plex is a good one to illustrate that we’re not all at the same ratio of FOSS use, some of us have more or less of each.
Please dont take this the wrong way - another user had a similar misunderstanding that I’m trying to clarify and understand - what do you think a promo post is? I ask because of your first comment, and this comment here about Plex.
Promotion of a software product? Not sure I understand where you’re coming from.
And now I’m doubly confused why you dont get the Plex reference.
Promo posts are purely promotional by the people who made them - not a discussion post or anything, basically a post thats an ad.
With Plex it would be like the Plex marketing team coming in to post about the new features of Plex version whatever and the $10 discount on the new $750 lifetime pass.
It would not be something like:
Etc.
The rule is only about those self promotional, sales style posts.
So I’m going to go ahead and try to update the rule for clarity now.
Yeah, that tracks fine.
It’s the recent one where a person told this group about their app, asked if anyone was interested in beta testing in exchange for full paid app access for free.
I don’t think that person posted in bad faith. But the crowd here acted like an absolute mob, calling him names, telling him to f*ck off, etc.
That was handled poorly. And I don’t think your rule would address the abuse part, regardless of how much “community interaction” you made a requirement.
That’s my problem with these new guidelines, they don’t address the venom people have towards folks for not much justifiable reason. You can’t just bend to what the crowd wants, sometimes they want blood.
Thats… Unfortunately another issue to be addressed here.
I also absolutely don’t like people commenting “slop” for anything within spitting distance of ai/llm’s, regardless of how it was used. For the record, there were months of backlogged reports about comments, despite tons of “rule 3” violations on posts never reported on, which I’ve now cleaned up.
I do think it does address it somewhat, in that there is no reason to dogpile if there is a valid rule to remove on, or its clearly permitted. It also clarifies on approved posts, and provides a valid reason to remove unhelpful and off topic comments for what is definitely a valid, rule abiding post.
Will of solve everything? No, but I think putting a rule like this in place is certainly the right direction overall.
Symfonium is another paid example. Amazing app. Even with the new rules we can post about them. With that, I don’t understand your original complaint.
If you’re not pushing your paywalled stuff, it doesn’t affect you, does it?
I’m not, but that shouldn’t be part of this conversation.
Where is the line for what you’re saying is “paywalled stuff”?
If someone promotes Plex, for example? Not allowed? What about deluxe features of homeassistant, which is fully open source, but paid?
To me, this says, if you’re posting something behind a paywall (F/LOSS or not) they’re going to look at your post history. If you’re a shill, it will be removed. If you’re someone who self hosts and just wants to talk about self hosted apps, you’re fine.
Said another way, if all you do is post promo content it’s not welcome here. If it’s a one off then post it.
Look, if you don’t like the rule, make a suggestion to the mods on how to make it better. The spirit here is we all love learning and using new tools paid or not. If you want to share something new to you, like Plex, I’m 100% sure its fine. Post, promote what you love, start a conversation around Plex. The problem is if you only ever talk about Plex and promote it. It gets old FAST and it’s not a community I want to he apart of.
Very well summarized, thank you.
This is functionally what I’m concerned about, and your comment above addresses it. Thanks.
Glad to hear it!
Just to say if you missed the “Hi I got made a mod here after I made constructive criticisms in a meta thread about rule 3” post a couple weeks ago, about the only thing not up for debate here would be being intolerant of the intolerant.
Otherwise - any rule or issue can be put up to a meta thread for discussion, including my being mod, at any time.
A rule still needs to be concise enough though, not a link to a discussion thread, which is why these posts are being made to share the amalgamated rule to make sure the community is on the same page before its put into practice.
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!
This will be up at least a day before the rule is put in place, and I’ll keep the post up for the week for discussion in case there are clarifications that become apparent, so feel free to take time in considering it. And if it doesn’t work or needs adjustment after, it can always be revisited too.
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.
This is specifically the reason why the exemption would exist - because it is a contribution to the community. You don’t have a paywall impacting use, the whole thing is just something being shared to others.
.
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.
Great question.
To be clear, this is about promo posts, and has nothing to do with discussing either of these projects.
So if HA decided to come in here and promo… Yes, that would be under the exemption, thats not a feature limitation but an add-on service. HA is not limited in any way by the subscription option with nabu casa.
Frigate on the other hand I don’t think would fall under the exemption. You can’t load models yourself - a feature specifically limited by subscription. If frigate devs came in to promote themselves, they would not fall under the exemption.
Again, either project (and closed source commercial projects) still can be discussed or posted about, this is specifically promo posting.
You can load models for Frigate yourself, and the documentation tells you how to do it, but the recommended Frigate+ models are easier to use. For example, downloading and configuring YOLO-NAS becomes just copying and pasting a
plus://URL when you’re signed in to Frigate+.As another example, I would consider GitLab not to be free because GitLab is a for-profit company, the open source version of GitLab intentionally lacks features that would be particularly useful to business users, and you can pay GitLab to get those features in a special GitLab distribution distributed under difference licensing terms. If GitLab had a plugin model, and unaffiliated developers created paid plugins for those features, then I think GitLab itself could be considered free. But if paid plugins were developed by the same developers, would that make it not free again?
More strange examples:
I guess to me it seems like there’s this gray area where you start having to think about intention and whether the software is really intended to be usable for the purposes that people in this community will want to use it for without having to pay the person doing the promoting.
Ah, that didn’t used to be the case. Or it changed quickly? I don’t recall tbh, but “easier to use” wouldn’t bar self-promo in that case, since you can load the models.
Not really weird, since v8 its AGPL, so its a fully open license. Prior license isn’t relevant.
Not a free license. No self-promo. OpenTofu? Totally fine (and personally recommended btw)
Docker desktop - no self promo. Docker, promo OK.
I’m not seeing the complexity.
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 think some people are having trouble understanding what a promotion post is, thus the edit.
If you are not from that company, you can post about it, have discussions, talk about features in new versions, whatever. If you are from a company trying to promote your own product, that is when the rule applies.
How does this in any way impact your ability to post about a non-free product?
Thank you for thoughtful engagement!
I think that becomes even more problematic. Why is it better that I shill for a company I’m getting kickbacks from (some VPN providers excel at this game) rather than one I’m responsible for? Besides, this just lead to submarining (“viral marketing” is an entire industry!) and people pretending to “have just stumbled across this project, what do you guys think?” or being “just a happy customer”… And to some extent t becomes a game of social status, where well-connected people can just ask their friends to post on their behalf.
Judge the message and topic, not the messenger (as long as they are human acting in good faith and not “written with help by AI”, obv).
Besides of those issues, my personal preference would be to keep the focus on self-hosting. So talk of hardware or shipped software might be on-topic but not service providers. There are plenty of places to discuss cloud-hosting, VPNs, which PaaS is best, or whatnot.
And I would actually be much more interested in seeing a post from a founder talking about things their company is doing relevant to self-hosters, vs yet another post of “which provider is best right now and what do you use?” or “Company X currently has a sale/launched product Y”.
While it might filter out some good stuff, I would be all for a ban of any promotion of commercial or proprietary products and services alltogether but allow for self-hostable and in particular FLOSS stuff (where I guess some carve-out or clever formulation could be made to allow for commercial but self-hostable software - either stance on that one seems fine to me).
I’m sorry, I don’t understand the issue here.
They would be held to the same rule, and both examples you give are the same. If you work for a company or own the company you are still making a self- promotional post for a company, and the rule applies.
Same statement here - if the message is a self-promo post, that is the type of post the rule applies to. This is quite literally what’s being described.
You seem to be vastly in the minority.
I’ll point out that this:
Does not happen in the first place. They make a post about their software, and generally get downvoted hard, the comments become very harsh, and within a fee days we had a meta thread about it.
So a more restrictive rule?
This is practically a jump to the complete opposite of what you just said.
I’m sorry, I’m trying to understand where the disconnect is here, and I’m really struggling to see it.
So if the exact same post is posted by a friend instead it’s suddenly accepted? Why is self-promo meaningfully less desired than third-party-promo if they have similar results?
Might be! That one’s framed as just personal preference and not policy suggestion because I don’t think “allow all things I like and ban everything I don’t” makes for good governance ;)
More restrictive in one sense (what content and what’s ok to “promote” for) but more allowing in another (you can talk about something even if you are involved or associated).
If that friend is actively participating in the fediverse and not coming in just to post constantly about a product… Then yes, which the employee/owner/whatever could also just do.
Seems like pretty far into edge case territory though.
Because that post ties to that person on the fediverse, not someone just coming in to blast marketing materials then disappear. Its less about the promo part and more about a way to manage / prevent a constant influx of spammy self promotion hit and runs.
If its what the community is interested in, its exactly the governance model that fits IMO.
And just like this rule, if the community preference changes, then so would the rule.
Except that would already be allowed under the current rule, the only change is that non-free wouldn’t be eligible for posting at all.
So everyone just adds a “I’m not working for x” to their posts?
That would be wildly unnecessary for non-promo posts, and pretty weird for promo posts to be by someone who doesn’t work there.
No
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.
That would be effectively the same as no rule at all, so I’m going to have to say that is not an option given the recent meta thread.
The issue is not repeat posts from specific posters, or even repeats - they just aren’t happening. What is happening, and caused the thread, were posts that were basically looking for beta/qa testers for their closed source app.
So “Please don’t be spammy” is not enough. What the majority asked for was strong limits or an outright ban.
I disagree that it would be the same than no rule at all, in my opinion that gives a pretty clear position on what’s allowed and what’s not without setting any strict limits so there’s some room for interpretation for community/mods to act.
Maybe rephrasing a bit helps: “This community is not an advertising platform. Self promotion is allowed only from active members of this community. Excessive promotion will result on post removals and/or ban from the community.”
What I’m afraid is that if there’s a strict rule then someone will argue that “only 9,87% of my posts are promotion, I don’t deserve a ban” even the rest of their content has little to no value for the conversation. And, since it’ll be a rule for the community, I personally think it should apply as it’s written, so it should have some kind of option to weed out smartasses trying to game the system in place.
But I’m not likely to promote anything around here, so for me it doesn’t really matter, just trowing out my thoughts about the matter.
Would spamming low effort comments to fill a quota then fall under the spam bit, not necessarily self promotion bit? It would be quite obvious and from what was written in the post, moderators have more hand-wavy freedom to decide what is spam.
I have no dog in this fight either since all of my projects are open hardware so nobody cares anyway because it would cost money to build it and test it out 😂
Possibly, but there’s equally gray area that what counts as low effort spamming and what actually contributes to the conversation. For example I’ve replied to comments “I’m using X to do Y” with “I’m using X too and I’m happy with it” to give an opinion to possible solutions. That kind of comments are easy enough to throw out and, if the “10% rule” is interpreted strictly, it isn’t really obvious if they should be considered as “improving your ratio” or as a part of actual conversation.
Yup! Especially if they get reported for suddenly blasting out low effort comments which would put them on “mod radar” as it were.
I dunno, plenty of us do stupid things with our money to try out something we want….
None of the posts that people have been complaining about were repeat posts.
It absolutely would be no different than no rule at all.
Now define active - how I did it was set a participation goal. How are you defining it here to make it a fair rule to be applied?
If someone is commenting and posting regularly enough to get a percentage like that, no one would even need to do the math to see participation for it to be an approvable post. And there is no ban here, just post removal.
Its about the people (or maybe bots) posting about a product in 9 posts, and 9 out of 10 comments, not the person who has a promo post in 11 out of 100 posts.
Spammy comments get yoinked or (if made elsewhere) noted as not actually participating with the self promo post removal.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 16 acronyms.
[Thread #24 for this comm, first seen 23rd Jun 2026, 05:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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.
No, you’re pretty active in general, so it would be left up.
But I see what you’re saying, it would be better to amend the community part. The 10% should really be said as your activity and not specific to the community.
I’m going to make an edit, thanks
How about
Edit: we’ve come full circle. Let’s just do ‘don’t be a shill’ and be done with it…