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.
I actually do want tagging of some sort, I think its a sensible approach overall. I think its a quick way to identify that your project used AI and people can quickly filter, per your example.
That said, I think that should be a separate item, and I don't want to inundate with stickies either. That was going to be my next "oh look a mod is annoying us with his opinion again" post, but then we ended up seeing a ton of promo content this week. I'm trying to stick to a mod post every week or two so everyone has a chance to see and respond to things.
That said, if you want to get that discussion ball rolling, feel free to make a meta post about it of course!
Thanks for your work, time and effort. I also think, it would be better to separate it and first end the discussion about promotions and co, so it could settle before kicking of another round^^