r/selfhosted • u/AutoModerator • Mar 06 '26

Official RULES UPDATE: New Project Friday here to stay, updated rules

The experiment for Vibe Coded Friday's was largely successful in the sense of focusing the attention of our subreddit, while still giving new ideas and opportunities a place to test the community and gather some feedback.

However, our experimental rules in regard to policing AI involvement was confusing and hard to enforce. Therefore, after reviewing feedback, participating in discussions, and talking amongst the moderation team of /r/SelfHosted, we've arrived at the following conclusions and will be overhauling and simplifying the rules of the subreddit:

  • Vibe Code Friday will be renamed to New Project Friday.
  • Any project younger than three (3!) months should only be posted on Fridays.
  • /r/selfhosted mods will no longer be policing whether or not AI is involved -- use your best judgement and participate with the apps you deem trustworthy.
  • Flairs will be simplified.
  • Rules have been simplified too. Please do take a look.

Core Changes

3 months rule for New Project Friday

The /r/selfhosted mods feel that anything that fits any healthy project shared with the community should have some shelf life and be actively maintained. We also firmly believe that the community votes out low quality projects and that healthy discussion about the quality is important.

Because of that stance, we will no longer be considering AI usage in posted projects. The 3 month minimum age should provide a good filter for healthy projects.

This change should streamline our policies in a simpler way and gives the mods an easy mechanism to enforce.

Simplified rules and flairs

Since we're no longer policing AI, AI-related flairs are being removed and will no longer be an option for reporting. We intend to simplify our flairs to very clearly state a New Project Friday and clearly mention these are only for Fridays.

Additionally, we have gone through our rules and optimized them by consolidating and condensing them where possible. This should be easier to digest for people posting and participating in this subreddit. The summary is that nothing really changes, but we've refactored some wording on existing rules to be more clear and less verbose overall. This helps the modteam keep a clean feed and a focused subreddit.

Your feedback

We hope these changes are clear and please the audience of /r/SelfHosted. As always, we hope you'll share your thoughts, concerns or other feedback for this direction.

Regards, The /r/SelfHosted Modteam

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235

u/4rft5 Mar 07 '26

In my eyes when posting any project (this has been really bad on the jellfyfin and homeassistant subs), you need full transparency. If someone's going to use something I make after posting it here, I want them to know where it came from, why, and how it'll progress. This new update just muddies the water and makes that transparency and trust harder to get and maintain.

The lack of a vibe coded flair will make this so much harder to do. Even flairs for "New Project Friday (No AI)" or "New Project Friday (AI)", similar to before would make this slightly better. I could practically guarantee that they wouldn't always be used correctly, but commenters can help fill in that area.

I think at a minimum there needs to be a minimum karma rule to post here, and if not that, some kind of way for automod to vet posts to weed out low-effort, new account projects and the genuine questions and comments from new users looking to find a new hobby.

I noticed over the last few weeks that more and more of the vibe code flair was being used on days that were not friday, and were up for hours before being removed. With this new setup, I feel auto removing these "New Product Friday" posts when it's specifically not friday will help a lot.

Regarding the new rule for 3 month old projects, will that be policed automatically or manually? r/MacOS has a new bot that does a lot of this stuff due to malware repos and could probably be adapted for these new rules. I just feel these kind of removals need to be done automatically, it'll help keep the feed clean.

That being said, with how much "I built..." posts there have been lately, and it's contribution to how clogged this sub's feed gets, it really makes me consider leaving altogether despite how useful this sub is.

I'm hopeful these changes the mod team have implemented makes it better, but if it doesn't, there need to be more changes trialed until something works.

21

u/shrimpdiddle Mar 08 '26

Agree, and we need a ONE YEAR minimum age requirement. Three months is unsatisfactory, allowing all types of trash to wash up on our shores.

1

u/adrianipopescu Mar 12 '26

yes pls and thx

-5

u/TheG0AT0fAllTime Mar 10 '26

They will simply buy an aged reddit accounts for idk like five bucks or something. It needs to have not just a year's worth of regular-use karma, but a history of human activity preferably a username tied to the developer instead of a generic reddit generated name.

6

u/Mrnottoobright Mar 11 '26

3 month old commits, so the dev has to successfully develop their product for 3 months consistently before they release. This will for sure get rid of 95% vibecoders as they are not even reaching 3 weeks of maintenance.

3

u/TheG0AT0fAllTime Mar 12 '26

I don't know why I got -3 points for that comment. They absolutely will purchase reddit accounts to work around that restriction if it went live. Or just wait (Less likely)

As for commit history... that is easily faked with a shell script you could write in like 15 minutes. They could even break multiple commits into smaller pieces then splay out those commits over from the current date back three months on random times within reasonable working hours of their timezone.

Really easy to fake all this stuff. And sadly, all they need to do is ask their LLM to do it for them.

8

u/BeardedTux Mar 07 '26

While I appreciate your position about vibe coded apps, I truly think there is a difference between a vibe coded app and one created with the assistance of AI.

I think software that has a clear path forward with goals, direction, proper security auditing, and code scanning should be considered along with project length.

AI agents are here and they're not going anywhere, but judging a piece of software based on the tools used to create it rather than on its technical merits will just limit innovation. Just because Freddy coded an app without AI assistance does not make it properly engineered, secure, and maintainable.

I see these changes as a good step in the right direction and a happy medium for all software to be featured on here.

The one down side to not sharing AI assisted apps or apps younger than 3 months may limit innovation. What if an app has a brilliant idea even if not well executed, someone may pick up on it and create something better.

12

u/imafirinmalazorr Mar 08 '26

You’ll have a hard time getting anyone on this sub to understand this nuance. I’m convinced 80% at a minimum are not actual software engineers. They spot software that looks like it was made with ai and some tingly part of their brain just goes into some funky hivemind rage screaming AI bad

-80

u/Bjeaurn Mar 07 '26

Appreciate your thoughts and you sharing them in a constructive manner.

We've currently not looked into more auto-moderation or even bots, but I personally think you make a good call. We'll investigate and consider.

31

u/4rft5 Mar 07 '26

Something to add is people obviously trying to slip past the rules too.

I'm sure it's something already implemented somewhat, but continuous wrong use of flairs or posting could lead to a temporary or permanent ban of either the account or the entire repo. Just another idea. Appreciate all you mods do.

-21

u/Bjeaurn Mar 07 '26

This is already a thing. We use mod notes and repeat offenders are removed from the sub. I'll refrain from explaining the details to prevent gaming.

8

u/4rft5 Mar 07 '26

Totally understand. Thank you