this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026

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114

Rule 2 Clarifications and New Rule proposal (anarchist.nexus)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) by curbstickle@anarchist.nexus to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

81 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Edit 4:

This has more than substantial community support, and is being put into effect immediately.

Please bear with me on the sidebar edit, as I'm not going to be in front of my PC for a bit.

As previously mentioned this will remain up for the week to allow for refinement for edge cases if possible, and be aware I'm trying to see what I can do to make this more of a direct vote on specific options going forward. If anyone believes this needs revisiting after the week is up, please feel free to start a conversation on it.

May your latency be low and your uptimes be high!

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.

(page 2) 33 comments

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[–] i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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:

Redis, which relicensed to a non-Free license in 2024, but would have still been usable by most people who are self hosting. Redis is available under AGPL since 2025.
All Hashicorp software, such as Terraform and Vault, which relicensed to a non-Free license in 2023, but is still usable for most people who are self hosting.
Docker, which is only free on Linux since it relicensed in 2022. Docker Engine only runs on Linux, but the closed-source Docker Desktop runs Docker Engine in a Linux VM and wraps the API to make it almost seamless on Windows and Mac OS, and for that you may need to pay a subscription.

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.

[–] curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 3 points 2 days ago

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.

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.

Redis, which relicensed to a non-Free license in 2024, but would have still been usable by most people who are self hosting. Redis is available under AGPL since 2025.

Not really weird, since v8 its AGPL, so its a fully open license. Prior license isn't relevant.

All Hashicorp software, such as Terraform and Vault, which relicensed to a non-Free license in 2023, but is still usable for most people who are self hosting.

Not a free license. No self-promo. OpenTofu? Totally fine (and personally recommended btw)

Docker, which is only free on Linux since it relicensed in 2022. Docker Engine only runs on Linux, but the closed-source Docker Desktop runs Docker Engine in a Linux VM and wraps the API to make it almost seamless on Windows and Mac OS, and for that you may need to pay a subscription.

Docker desktop - no self promo. Docker, promo OK.

I'm not seeing the complexity.

[–] EarMaster@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zone 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

FOSS / FLOSS isn't nec. free (gratis) though. We might end up yak shaving with these definitions. Better to have a singular rule for all?

I'm thinking of it from both mods side and community side. Obnoxious advertising - FOSS or otherwise - is obnoxious.

10% rule is a good one. 30 day rule is another good one. Use both?

IMHO.

[–] curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 1 points 2 days ago (9 children)

FOSS / FLOSS isn't nec. free (gratis) though. We might end up yak shaving with these definitions.

And if it is paywalled in any way it wouldn't meet the criteria for exemption in the first place, so that would be a non-issue.

As far as the 30 day rule goes, thats basically an outright ban on promo posts given the current status of the fediverse.

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[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (19 children)

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.

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[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
Git	Popular version control system, primarily for code
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
Plex	Brand of media server package
VPN	Virtual Private Network

[Thread #24 for this comm, first seen 23rd Jun 2026, 05:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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