My personal thought as a lurker trying to learn enough through osmosis to start her own set-up is that hardware concerns are fine as long as they still relate to self-hosting in some fashion. “What hardware setup would be good for beginners looking to self-host a Google Drive alternative on a budget?” is self-hosting, fine, and the type of thing I would bookmark for my own reference. “Anyone have advice on cannibalizing an old laptop to DIY a mini PC?” would really not be self-hosting, even if your plan is to use the resulting mini PC to self-host a server.

I’d also be inclined to treat posts that are off-topic but have a selection of informative high-effort comments by locking them and sharing them to the appropriate community for further discussion there vs. removing them entirely.

Which is to say, yes, I like your proposed revision.

Agree. Hardware’s is also a good chunk of self hosting and it should be open for discussion. As far as it’s centered around using that hardware for self hosting

Sounds reasonable approach to me. Also I’d include VPS and other cloud services too. “Is this VPS enough to run NextCloud” is a perfectly reasonable question for this community just like “is my old thinkpad good for…”. I don’t think there should (nor can) be a hard rule about what hardware to use. Questions obviously outside of self hosting (e.g. “what GPU I should by to play minecraft”) should go elsewhere but otherwise I don’t think there’s even a real need to limit activity.

And also there’s a half a dozen of posts here daily (unless mods remove posts really efficiently). My opinion is that even if the post could go to some other community but leans to self-hosting side of things it can stay. Maybe if there was tens or hundreds of posts daily it would make more sense to limit what goes, but as things are now I don’t think any kind of (in a lack of a better word) gatekeeping is beneficial to this community nor anyone else.

I’m mostly a lurker. I’ve also been selfhosting for at least a decade, and I’m a professional in the IT sphere.

I wholeheartedly support this rule change. Hardware is a big part of selfhosting/home labs. And for some people, it’s a hard leap to make.

If we end up seeing lots of redundant posts (e.g. “Can I use my old laptop to host stuff?”), we can always start an FAQ or something. But until and unless it becomes a problem, keeping the rule simple sounds perfect.

As others have mentioned here, there is a lot of natural overlap with vps renting, hardware re-use, gerenal approaches to managing infrastructure, docker, and Linux in general. I don’t even mind networking questions here.

When questions stray in that aren’t really that relevant, like beginner Linux questions, someone is generally nice enough to point to a more appropriate community.

What I think wastes time in this community are the gatekeeping topics like “your vps isnt self-hosting”.

• I’ve always felt that if you are soliciting recommendations for self hosting equipment, why not ask self hosters? I would say that 99% of all equipment threads that get posted here are directly related to beginners or even seasoned vets, asking 'what kind of equipment world I need to run ‘xxx stack’. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a thread where the OP was building his next gaming machine asking for recommends.

• The whole gatekeeping about the strict definition of ‘self hosting’. Self hosting is a huge conglomeration of different approaches. Sometimes, especially with beginners, outright buying a proper piece of equipment to use in your residence might be problematic, or cost prohibitive. However a small, $30 USD/year VPS might fit for getting your feet wet, or even on into the future. In past lives I have started, modded, forums. I used to be a mod at reddit for quite a while of a good handful of subs like De-Google/De-Amazon/ all the De-(corporate services). I seriously despise gatekeeping. I think we can all co-exist whether you have a full blown rack in your closet that dims the neighborhood lights when you power up, a small VPS, an RPi, or a repurposed disposable vape-server (which was pretty doggone impressive).

I honestly haven’t seen too many completely off topic threads started here. There are a few. There was the Anonymous recruiting thread, a lost Lemmy with children down on his luck, and a few others. However, for the most part, people who bypass reddit and navigate all the way to Lemmy c/selfhosting are pretty much within the realm of selfhosting.

I believe in being encouraging and positive, even if the topic of discussion is something I’m not really kosher with. We’re all, I’m assuming, fully autonomous adults capable of making our own decisions…and living with them.

*it’s

…it is related

I’d replace “be prepared to explain to others” etc with

“Please ensure it is clear in your post how it relates to selfhosting”

Be prepared is a bit vague. Your preceding explanation calls out that what is in the poster’s mind is often not clear to others, and the rules are there to remind people of the standards required. My suggestion is still a little vague, but I suspect anything blunter might cause offence.