Selfhosted

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.

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.

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.

Ban advertising!

No advertisement is ever appropriate, period. Advertisements should be banned. I don't mind a 'look what I made' post, but when the post designed to convince me to give you money, I see an immediate conflict of interest that suggests advertisement rather than information. It's hard to draw that line without knowing intention, so I don't think those posts should be disallowed, but if your post asks me to click a link to a product so I can give you my money, I'm downvoting.

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.

I think self-hosting has the expectation of the ability to self-host for indefinite period of time. E.g. I can run Jellyfin 10.10 for as long as I have the hardware and willingness to run it. A proprietary piece of software, say Plex, could technically allow that too, but that's much less likely. Since I can't see its source code, I can't know if there's a time bomb that stops it from working at some future date. Or an update/remote procedure I don't know about that asks me to pay $750 at some point to continue using it. Which could preclude me from being able to continue self-hosting it. Is the ability to self-host indefinitely an expectation everyone shares? Probably not. Probably worth thinking about in this context though.

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.

IMO, if you have some sort of posting/commenting history, and you're talking about a paid service that you happen to like, then no problem. If you're brand new and just posting to promote something, nah.

Should not be allowed.

As long as it's self-hosted I don't have a problem with it. Plex is maybe a good example for this. I wouldn't ban Plex questions as long as it isn't just a weekly advertising post. Up- and down voting can handle the rest.

If it's software that is self hosted and might be useful, I'm okay with it. We have the vote up/down to sort the wheat from the chaff. And worse case the comments can rip it apart and offer alteratives.

If it's foss or whatever abso-fucking-lutely. I love reading about new things. I first learned of Orca Slicer in a post about Bambu Slicer on 3d printing community. I'm also all for supporting solo devs. I feel that closed source is a cromulent option that has been abused by corporations. But hey, like this is just, like my opinion dude!

The initial post might be spam, but it's the discussion where the meat and potatoes live. Now, reposts of the same product (unless it's to show off major new features like once a year) I do draw the line at.

Full transparency, I'm not super active in this community, but I love reading the stuff here.

It's obvious spam... I'd assume they're deleted and banned asap, are thes not?

In this context: https://lemmy.world/post/48453617 I think it's just fine.

OP is not asking anyone to buy their product. OP is not shilling their product. OP is asking those who run the *arr stack, and who are interested, to beta test the product, and in return, the beta tester gets the final product for free. This is how beta testing works. Where else would be a good place to have people beta test a product that integrates with what the majority of selfhosters run (*arr stack in this instance) than in a community of selfhosters?

It shouldn't be.

This is /c/selfhosted, not /c/opensourceselfhosted so why not?

There is no rule about advertising in the sidebar. I'm personally fine with it. If it weren't advertised here, I might never hear about projects to be honest. Almost everything I'm hosting right now came about because I heard about it on a forum.

I don't mind small developers posting about new releases or whatnot, but I'm concerned about a slippery slope. We don't want þe community to become an advertising hellscape innundated by ads from þe likes such as Adobe, Microsoft, or Palantir. Not þat it's likely þey would, but once you allow it, how do you prevent it if it does happen? Even one corporate ad is too much, IMHO.