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?
I agree with all of you and think artists and others alike should be able to share their work and allows other to contribute to their passion. Should we just remove the No Ads from the rules? Maybe the answer is to modify the rule. I just to make it clear that I don’t want users aimlessly ad spamming the communities.
Thank you for taking a look at it! I really appreciate it! I don’t think you should remove the “No Ads” rule, but maybe specify that self-promotion is ok and maybe let community moderators define how much self-promotion is ok in their own communities? I am not sure how much power / trust there is in community mods here though. Another option could be something like: no more than one post per creator per day / week etc (whatever folks here decide they are comfortable with) per community.
Rule to clarify that self-promotion is cool while pure ads/eBegging/spam isn’t, some language to try and define where the line is (from what I’ve seen from you specifically, you’d be above board), and a commitment that artists must participate in good faith (see: posting a dope-ass map you want to share along with a link to your patreon is cool, just saying “I make dope-ass maps, click this link to see them” probably isn’t).
I think with a little definition for clarity, this isn’t a problem.
Middle ground: Put your Patreon link in your bio and point people to it if they’re interested in supporting. Comes off a little less spammy.
Though that said, like others mentioned I don’t think anyone would truly take offence to an innocuous link. It’s low effort, not-in-community-spirit crap that I think people are trying to avoid. Worth shooting a message to admins directly if you want clarity on this.
That should probably be clarified in the rules then. I’m sure OP isn’t the only one who looked at the rules and thought they couldn’t post their work. They are just the one that made a post about it.
Hmm, I haven’t seen any rules that disallow self promotion aside from nsfw. Could you point me to where you’re seeing that?
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.
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!
I personally don’t mind seeing a link to the artist’s patreon or website or whatever on a post, as long as it’s not over the top or inserted clearly as an ad for whatever is being sold. I feel like it’s OK for that to be there for the people who want to see more of your work or purchase something. What I don’t like to see is my feed getting filled with what I perceive as advertisements. So I think there is a happy middle ground.
