Even so, it does not follow that this community should provide that commercialization venue. If you want me involved in solving your business problems or monetization strategy, we should discuss terms and rates first.

Sounds like a reasonable set of options!

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.

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?

You seem to be vastly in the minority.

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 ;)

So a more restrictive rule?

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).

Thank your for replying, this is encouraging and sounds like moderation of this community is shaping up.

Whichever side the ruling falls I think that feedback channel would be very good. Just having a way for a submitter to ask from mod(s) why the submission was targeted might be the difference between them turning into a great contributor vs either just leaving or starting to play circumvention games (in especially bad cases turning into antagonistic trolls). Speaking from how I’ve seen those dynamics play out in other communities.

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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 would like some clarity on general apparent self-promotion of open source projects as well. As in, points 1-4 don’t apply and 5 depends on your definition of “advertisement”.

I’m bringing this up because I (once) previously attempted to share a project¹ I maintain on here. I did take some effort to include some context and discussion points for selfhosters in order to make it more tailored and stay safe on Rule 3. It was quickly removed by mod. I tried reaching out to one of the mods to try to understand what was wrong. They were friendly and said they weren’t involved and would forward to the relevant people and since then I haven’t heard back. It would be very helpful to be able to get some feedback on why submission was removed so we can learn how future submission attempt could be improved (or abandoned).

¹: FLOSS, no commercial or otherwise proprietary parts or relations, no slop or clank in the process

A dedicated Forgejo instance f.example.com.

For a small set of trusted “base” images (e.g. docker.io/alpine and docker.io/debian): A Forgejo Action on separate small runner, scheduled on cron to sync images to f.example.com/dockerio/ using skopeo copy.

Then all other runners have their docker/podman configuration changed to use that internal forgejo container registry instead of docker.io.

Other images are built from source in the Forgejo Actions CI. Not everything needs to be (or even should) be fully automated right off. You can keep some workflows manual while starting out and then increase automation as you tighten up your setup and get more confident in it. Follow the usual best practices around security and keep permissions scoped, giving them out only as needed.

Git repos are mirrored as Forgejo repo mirrors, forked if relevant, then built with Forgejo Actions and published to f.example.com/whatever/. Rarely but sometimes is it worth spending time on reusing existing Github Workflows from upstreams. More often I find it easier to just reuse my own workflows.

This way, runners can be kept fully offline and built by only accessing internal resources:

• apt/apk repo mirror or proxy
• synced base container images
• synced git sources

Same idea for npm or pypi packages etc.

Set up renovate¹ and iterate on its configuration to reduce insanity. Look in forgejo and codeberg infra repos for examples of how to automate rebasing of forked repo onto mirrors.

I would previously achieve the same thing by wiring together more targeted services and that’s still viable but Forgejo makes it easy if you want it all in one box. Just add TLS.

¹: Or anyone have anything better that’s straightforward to integrate? I’m not a huge fan of all the npm modules it pulls in or its github-centric perspective. Giving the same treatment to renovate itself here was a little bit more effort and digging than I think should really be necessary.