Promotion of apps you created is considered an ad, therefore it’s not allowed in this community. Rule 3 has been clarified with 3.1 to specify this. We will not remove existing posts but will do so for future posts.
However, we will start a monthly self promo threads starting August, and this will be only place where self promo is allowed. This thread will be for apps that are created by people in the community, so ads for other apps are still not allowed.
EDIT: Based on feedback, the community has found it helpful to discover new Lemmy apps for alternatives. Therefore, we will allow ONE post for a new Lemmy app, provided that they link to their own community for future posts. We will not allow additional posts/updates on the specific apps.
I think it has been very useful with promotion of the various Lemmy apps coming out for iOS / macOS and don’t mind them at all. Maybe they could be allowed for a time still so new apps in the space still get a fair chance to grow and become alternatives?
We have a pinned post that I try to keep up-to-date for iOS apps (at least active ones with TestFlight/AppStore links). It was created because there were many posts at the time about apps so we wanted a place to consolidate. And there’s already a community [email protected] to discover new apps. I think these are sufficient to find other Lemmy apps.
However, I’ll discuss this again with the mod team and see if we want to be more lenient about new Lemmy apps.
Thanks, I didn’t know about !lemmyapps - that will cover my own needs at least.
If you could also track kbin apps, that would be useful
I don’t use kbin so I’m not following apps they build there. If you want to create the post and keep track of them, I’m happy to pin it to the community. I just can’t commit to keeping it updated even if I do create the post.
So, to be clear - if the author posts about a new app here - self promotion. If someone else does - that’s all good?
No, technically it’s still not allowed since that’s an ad. The post was originally made to stop all the other posts talking about the various apps. I’m not sure about kbin apps. Do you want it included in the current pinned post or should it be a separate post? Or I guess kbin might have their own community that lists it?
Wait what?
How is it an ad if it wasn’t posted by the developer?
The developer can just ask someone else to post it. That’s mostly what an ad is, creator paying someone/an agency to promote their creation.
Please don’t take this as criticism, I’m just trying to understand the policy. Because as currently written the policy doesn’t match up with what you’ve said in this thread.
I think most people would read the rules and assume “Hey checkout this cool app I just discovered” by a regular user of the app as perfectly fine and allowed, and they’d be pretty upset if their post was deleted or account banned for that. If you’re saying those posts are against the rules then it needs to be clearly written in the policy.
Also - if someone asks “What password manager do you use?” is every single response in that thread also against the rules? Could I be banned for replying? Disreputable marketing companies absolutely will post (and respond) to threads like that. If the policy is to block those, then asking for product advice really needs to be against the rules too.
Instead of a pinned post, I think it’d be better to create another community where people can share apps they’ve discovered. I’d subscribe to that.
The mod team agreed that for now we want to allow discovery of new Lemmy apps. We’ll allow ONE post for a new Lemmy app, given that they’ll link to their own community so further discussions/updates will be done elsewhere. And future posts of the same app will not be allowed. This is only for Lemmy apps because it’s of a particular interest to us, but not allowed for any other apps.