For a while now, the story of Barburas Lab has been scattered across a handful of one-off Reddit posts; a thread here on r/nextcloud when Nóta shipped, another on r/DigitalEscapeTools when Blik got its AI tagging update, and so on. Those posts did well. Genuinely well, better than I expected. But a post is a snapshot, not a home. Once it scrolls off the front page, there’s nowhere for the conversation to keep living.
That’s what r/BarburasLab is for.
Why a dedicated subreddit
Reposting the same app to the same general-purpose subreddits over and over isn’t sustainable, and it isn’t really fair to those communities either; they’re not exclusively about my apps, and I don’t want to be the person who shows up every few weeks with another announcement. A dedicated space solves that cleanly: people who want to follow along can subscribe once, and everyone else’s feed stays exactly as they left it.
It also means feedback, bug reports, and feature requests finally have one address instead of being spread across comment threads on posts that are, by the time anyone reads them a second time, a month old.
What lives there
r/BarburasLab covers everything under the Barburas Lab name; Android apps, Home Assistant add-ons, and WordPress plugins alike. That was a deliberate choice. All of it comes from the same place: free, open-source, privacy-first tools built for people who self-host and don’t want ads or tracking bolted onto software they’re already paying for with their own server hardware.
Each post gets flair matching what it’s about, so if you only care about one specific project, you can filter straight to that and ignore the rest.
A note on how these get built
I use AI-assisted development throughout the suite, and that’s disclosed openly; in the subreddit, in release notes, everywhere. It’s not a footnote I’d rather people miss. It’s genuinely part of how a single person manages to maintain seven apps, a handful of WordPress plugins, and Home Assistant add-ons without burning out. If that changes how you feel about using the tools, that’s a completely fair position to hold, and I’d rather you know upfront than find out later.
Come say hello
If you’re already using any of the apps, or you’re the self-hosted-Nextcloud-Home Assistant type who might, r/BarburasLab is where updates, roadmap talk, and support will live from here on out. Bug reports are genuinely useful to me, feature requests get read even when they don’t get built right away, and it’s a much better use of everyone’s time than another one-off post buried in a subreddit that’s only tangentially about what I make.
See you there.
