A source-backed Rankhog guide to r/homeassistant: public rules, community context, posting fit, and startup-promotion risk before you publish.
By Anthony Riera, founder and operator of Rankhog.
Subreddit guides combine public Reddit source URLs, captured rules, visible verification dates, and Rankhog's account-safety workflow.
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This is the community for Home Assistant, the open source home automation platform that puts local control and privacy first. The people here describe themselves as tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts, so the room is full of folks who build their own smart home setups and like getting their hands dirty. The software is free and available at home-assistant.io, and the project sits under the Open Home Foundation. Posts and comments should be about Home Assistant or its wider ecosystem, which covers Open Home Foundation projects, integrations, hardware, and related home automation. The rules also stress that this is a welcoming and inclusive community, and that discussion stays focused on home automation rather than politics.
The rule that changes everything for anyone doing marketing here is “No AI generated responses”. It bans answers generated by AI tooling, including ChatGPT and Claude, because people want answers from humans. If you write your posts with AI help, they can be removed, so write everything yourself. Next is “No spam or ads”, which bans obvious spam and ads, with one exception for the Open Home Foundation's commercial partners. The same rule explicitly allows personal projects and YouTube content related to Home Assistant or its sister projects, and that carve out is your legal path into this community. “Commercial use of the Home Assistant logo is strictly prohibited” matters if you build anything in this space. The logo is trademarked by the Open Home Foundation, and using it to market or promote a product or service for sale needs explicit written permission. That includes logos generated with AI. “Stay on topic” limits posts to Home Assistant and its wider ecosystem, including Open Home Foundation projects, integrations, hardware, and related home automation. “No reposts” asks you to check before posting and to join an existing discussion instead of starting a duplicate thread. “No engagement bait or karma farming” bans posts that mainly harvest upvotes or replies, including low substance polls and reposting other people's work as your own. Finally, “Post in English” applies to everything you write here.
The winning shape here is the personal project post. The rules say posting personal projects and YouTube content related to Home Assistant is fine, so if you built an integration, a dashboard, a sensor setup, or a tool that works with Home Assistant, show it. Write the post yourself, in your own words, in English, and make it genuinely useful to someone tinkering with their own setup. Explain what you built, how it works, and what you learned, and share it because the community will find it interesting, not because you want clicks. Check the sub first to make sure nobody posted the same thing recently, and if they have, join that discussion instead. If your project touches Home Assistant, keep the focus there and let the wider ecosystem context stay secondary. If you ever want to use the Home Assistant logo in anything commercial, get explicit written permission from the Open Home Foundation first.
The fastest way to get removed is posting AI generated content, since the rule names ChatGPT and Claude directly and says people are looking for answers from humans. Ads are not allowed unless you are an Open Home Foundation commercial partner, so a promotional link from a random account reads as spam and gets reported for removal. Do not use the Home Assistant logo to market anything you sell, because commercial use is prohibited without written permission from the foundation. Do not repost images, videos, or links that were shared recently, and check before you post. Do not post off topic content, because anything unrelated to Home Assistant may be removed. Do not post in another language, since English is the only language allowed here. Do not farm karma with engagement bait like upvote prompts, generic favorite polls, or hot take polls, and never repost someone else's work as your own. And keep attacks and politics out of it, because personal attacks and partisan content are both against the rules.
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Not as ads. “No spam or ads” bans ads unless you are an Open Home Foundation commercial partner. Personal projects and YouTube content related to Home Assistant are explicitly allowed, so a genuine project post is the safe path.
No. “Commercial use of the Home Assistant logo is strictly prohibited” covers anything that markets or promotes a product or service for sale, and it needs explicit written permission from the Open Home Foundation.
No. “No AI generated responses” bans answers generated by AI tooling because people want answers from humans. Write every word yourself.
Yes, if it is genuinely about Home Assistant or its wider ecosystem, including integrations and related home automation hardware, and written in English.
Check the sub first. “No reposts” says not to share images, videos, or links that were already shared recently, and to join the existing discussion instead.
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