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?
Seems like this post is helpful for other people with the same question, and a good basis for discussion about what the community sees as acceptable norms with regards to self promotion.