this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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Selfhosted

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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.

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  2. No spam.

  3. Posts are to be related to self-hosting.

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  7. Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the links in Rule 8 for details.

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A number of brand new accounts have popped up shilling their paid for applications.

Is this within the rules? Is the community happy with this? Could mods clarify this in the rules?

Either allowing advertising, or banning it entirely.

my point is - there is a difference between an open source homegrown project that might be useful, vs closed source paid for projects from brand new accounts

some replies are misunderstanding, somehow.

I am against

brand new accounts who:

  1. first post is a brand new project
  2. project is closed source
  3. project will cost money
  4. is asking for free testing
  5. the post is literally an advertisement
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[–] mereo@piefed.ca 8 points 3 weeks ago

Self-hosting is a community effort in which the whole community helps each other to self-host their data, including programming the services people use for this purpose. The problem with closed-source software is that we don't know what's happening behind the scenes, or if it's indeed sending telemetry.

Even worse, if that service is ever no longer supported or updated, I'll be left with data on my server that can't be used to its full potential, and a service that won't receive security updates.

Open-source software, on the other hand, is a community effort. If, for example, software is no longer updated or supported, it can easily be forked, and my data can be transferred to the new service.