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?
There is, of course, a difference between a post that's pure ad, and a post that's art that contains a Patreon link. One provides nothing to the viewer, the other is a normal post with a little self-promotion added.
It's good to err on the side of caution in this, but the admins should really add a note about self-promotion to any rule about ads, to clarify this.
I really do hope that they do. Otherwise, I do not think that, at least this instance, is going to have any artists, musicians, writers and other creatives be active here.
Have you contacted any instance admins about this yet?
no, I haven't. Any idea how to go about it?
For any community, you can easily go to its page on its own instance by clicking the gray link right under the community name. For this community, it looks like "!main@sh.itjust.works". From there, you can click the instance name on the top left to go to its home page. On the right sidebar, it'll show the instance rules, and below that is a list of admins. You could just pick one from there to send a message to, about this.
Alternatively, you could post about this on the "main" communities of various instances. They don't necessarily have the same name but they're usually not hard to find.
Thank you!
I posted this thread on the main on my home instance. I will see fi I can reach out to them.
While FMHY isn't an art-focused instance, I've had a pleasant interaction with one of its admins before, so I poked them (Kaizen) about this.
would be interested to hear what they have to say!
FMHY now has an updated rule: "4. Self-Promotion is fine, but please keep “donation” links in your bio."
I have replied, asking about watermarks and other ways of reminding people to look there. Though I think watermarks are pretty much gonna have to be accepted anyway, as they're necessary to deal with people reposting without credit anyway. So you could just have a visible artist tag somewhere on the art, have a link in your bio, and it should be alright?
Edit: So yeah, watermarks are totally fine. And other reminders to check the bio for a link might also be? Just got a "yeah that's fine" and I'm not sure if I can actually re-read my own messages to Kaizen. Anyway, the main point is to prevent people from spamming links, apparently.