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?
First - that's beautiful work.
Second - I wish more open source folks would make a distinction between "advertising" and "self-promotion." I've never minded the latter as much as the former.
That said - nuance makes for more argument and difficulty in moderation. It's the same question of "tasteful nude photography" or "porn".
Thank you! Glad you like my work <3.
I agree - I don't think that spam is good, and I don't think it should a part of the community. I do think that some sort of guidelines or rules in regard to self-promotion would work. A limit to posting either once a day or once a week in communities with your work, or something along those lines.
Otherwise, there just won't be artists, writers, musicians and other creatives here.
Yes - some guidelines would be good at least. And I think there is room to allow exceptions within a community. Maybe even some sort of 'flag' that indicates "self promotion is allowed" so people could exclude them if they wanted.
There are definitely some possible options other than "Allowed/Not Allowed".