Selfhosted

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

If it's closed source but can be self hosted, what is the business model? I think it would be hard to fight piracy in that case. If it requires connecting to a service periodically for licenses and has no free version that doesn't require that, then I believe it should be banned. I don't consider that self-hosted. If the company disappears and the served goes down, its dead. That's just running on your hardware, but not under your control. If the application is open or can be run locally without connecting to their servers and the paid portion is an add on like working as a proxy or something, then I have no real issue with that.

That said, there definitely should be a higher standard for users who are only marketing here. They should be making posts specifically for this group, not just sharing generic ads. The post should specifically state why it's useful to self-hosters and thus relevant to the group.

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.