Maybe the difference is the fact that Dessalines is directly involved in the Lemmy project. Maybe that makes it self promotion in the Apollo dev's eyes? 🤷
I don't understand people's issue with self-promotion. If it's unhelpful, i.e. spam? Sure, nobody wants to try something completely irrelevant or broken. That's because it's irrelevant or broken.
If you've put a lot of work into something, especially for free, which solves someone's problem; I think you have every right to shout it from the roof tops?
It's not like anyone was spamming about Lemmy before people had an issue with Reddit. I had to go hunting to find it months ago.
No self promotion is a very simple quality filter. Pretty much everyone is proud of something they made, but finding someone else that also is willing to promote it is much harder. By blocking self promotion they're setting a low bar that needs to be cleared where you have to find someone else to vouch for you. That said, once at least one other person has posted about it you should be allowed to post as well since you've effectively cleared that bar at that point.
People are a lot more likely to promote their own products if they're allowed to than to promote someone else's work, and it quickly becomes spammy of people talking about their own "superior" projects. I fully agree that this is great though, but I get where christain was coming from removing it from his post
Self-promotion rules are really weird for open-source projects too. Its like we're telling people about a pizza recipe that we created and are sharing freely... we're not selling anything or trying to profit off people.
It is still self promotion. Lemmy is stagnated for years without user content. Sure there is a window for Lemmy now with reddit changes and you are probably not the only one promoting Lemmy. But you guys promote it where nobody need it lol.
People definitely need Lemmy now more than ever. Reddit is going public. It's only matter of time before they ban porn outright and stifle more communities and discussion. I'm very much looking forward to more Lemmy instances and communities.
Voat is a sad story. The site itself was very good. When Reddit purged their worst subs and users, they all went to Voat. Predictably it became extremely toxic.