I decided to do a bit of a dive into this platform, and while I think it is an interesting idea, I am yet to find a space on Lemmy where I am welcome. I am an artist. I have a Patreon that pays my bills and puts food on the table. Generally, I give the majority of my stuff away for free to the community, but that usually comes with a link to my Patreon, which is optional, but is there for people if they want to support me. I need to eat too. As far as I understand, that is not allowed here. Or pretty much any other instance I've come across on Lemmy. The obvious solution is to create my own instance, I suppose, but I am already running two communities on Discord, and generally work ungodly amounts on my art, so adding running an instance on top of that is just not feasible. I also lack the needed technical skills to run something like that. In the meantime, I am constantly seeing people complain that there isn't a lot of content here. Guess who's good at creating content? Creators. But you need to allow us to eat in order to create content for you. Am I alone on this?
The problem is that the entire instance has rules, one of those rules is no ads. So even if I create a new community, the instance rules still apply.
I think its more so related to product placements. Cool community art is encouraged and I guess its no harm to link to your portfolio for users to check out. If people can link to their games or code why shouldnt you be able to link to your art.
I don't think starting an instance of your own is too difficult, but I understand why it'd be nicer to host on sh.itjust.works