I like this platform, and hope it succeeds, however I have a question for the community - what are everyone’s thoughts on creators? I am one, for transparency-sake, and I am pretty sure we are not wanted here, since most of us have Adventures/ Art / Battle maps / Patreons / Kickstarters / Products to sell, even though we frequently give a lot of stuff for free to the community. Thoughts?
You may want to consider creating your own community, specifically made for creators to share their announcements. It the same as allowing users to opt-out of newsletters really: either they are interested in potentially spending money on creations, or they would never consider doing so.
If you go this route, you would definitely be in your right to create a post here to announce the creation of such a community. It’s not an ad, it’s information linking to a new community which will be a self-promoting platform for creators.
I’m just confused by what you are asking. Are you asking if this community is OK with you self promoting D&D related stuff you made and want to sell? If it were up to me, I would say yes within reason, no one wants this community to become one loud ad. But I’m not sure the moderator would agree and it is up to them. I don’t see a no self-promotion rule yet but maybe message them directly?
If you just want to share content you found and generally participate like normal then I am absolutely sure you are wanted here.
My question was about the community’s outlook on the presence of creators in this space - and yes, that means at least some of the stuff they’d post would be self-promotion.
I dont think that the platform should turn into just a wall of ads, all of the subreddits had sensible rules for that, like only posting once a week etc.
The instance that this community is on does not allow ads. I do not know whether self-promotions fall under that… I feel like it does? So that would mean none of us are welcome here, at least in professional capacity.
I spent a while looking for a “no ads” rule and then I figured it out.
Your home instance sh.itjust.works , where your account lives, has a rule of no ads. Lemmy.world, where this D&D community lives, does not appear to (yet) have a broad rule against advertisements.
I would still ask the mod before posting self promotion tho.
here are the only rules relevant lemmy.world I could find (from mastadon.world):
“Regarding Spam: We are not your free advertising platform. If you are here only to sell your products or services, you will be removed. Occasional posts of commercial links are OK, but when the vast majority of a user’s posts are commercial in nature, we regard the account as a Spam account. Moderators will evaluate reports of Spam on a case by case basis.”
so it seems just do it in a restrained way and don’t let it be the majority of your content and it should be ok?
I mean… thing is… On reddit i have 80k karma because of my content posts. 99% of my posts there are my content posts. That would be considered “spamming” here, even if I only post once a week.
I’d much rather spend time painting an extra battle map for the community than sit on lemmy to hit whatever quota of interaction to not be considered a spammer.
If 99% of your posts are advertising your content, then you are not engaging with the community, you are looking at it as a free advertising opportunity. It’s no different than those people on social media who only post links to their onlyfans or some other side hustle. I don’t come here to read ads for content. I come here to interact with other gamers, to learn and share, not to profit off them.
I would interpret as an expectation that if you’re selling things then it’s ok of your an engaged member of the community. It’s not a market place where you call out to potential buyers and ask if they want to see your stuff, it’s a pub where you chat to the regulars and occasionally sell them stuff. I think the other comment about having a dedicated creator space for this sort of thing would be a good move.
I’m not the person in charge, but if I were to interpret that rule, it seems like it is basically trying to keep the content quality good. If self-promotion becomes a drag on the overall content quality, it would probably be called spam. if your self-promotion is interesting and contributes to the community, no one would probably ever bat an eye that it was most of your posts.
the best and most honest way to sort this out is to find some people in charge and run it by them. unfortunately, except for @[email protected] our mod, I doubt any of them are spending a lot of time in this community, so like @[email protected] said, you probably should ask elsewhere.
Yeah, I’ll post there tomorrow. Thanks for the advice! I have a feeling it’s just not going to be an option though. “Good” and “interesting” content is subjective. What happens when I post a bunch of “good” content and then a dud? I hope I wouldn’t, but sometimes stuff just doesn’t hit, and then it would mean a ban for me if enough people didnt think it was good enough? Doesnt seem worth the risk.
I just want to say, try to be optimistic about this.
right now these communities are very new and small. they don’t have a lot going on. most content at the moment is good content, just because we want stuff to fill out the front page.
if you want to message me about the stuff you make, I’m now very curious about it
As far as I know, we don’t have user based karma here. Only posts and comments get a score. But we really should make sure that the community does not get over-run with a specific type of post. Unless the community is for that specific purpose, of course.
But I can imagine that not every instance would like to host a “share your Kickstarter project” community, as those posts will also show up for the users that like to read all local posts. Here on Lemmy.world that feed would already be a full of stuff you aren’t interested in though, but that’s my opinion and I also never used r/all or any of the other extremely broad subreddits.
Karma wasn’t really the point I was trying to make. I was just trying to say that I posted a lot of content on Reddit, a lot of it highly upvoted. I followed all the rules there too - not posting more than once a week on certain subreddits etc. However, that was 99% of my activity on reddit. If I was to do the same here, I would be considered a spammer, and likely banned.
oh I thought for sure I saw a no ads rule on lemmy.world as well. I am on Gerboa now, no idea how to get to instance rules on this app O.O
yeah gerboa (and lemmy in general tbh) are very unfinished software. I’ve found if I want to be able to access everything on mobile, going back and forth between gerboa and my mobile browser was necessary.
maybe this link will help? this is the rules for lemmy.world and mastadon.world: https://mastodon.world/about
You should always follow the rules of the instance, of course. But if you want to do something that is not within the rules of the instance, you can always set up your own instance or find another instance where this is allowed. Even if a community (like a subreddit) on an instance thinks a certain, way, they can’t conflict with the instance rules.
Creators would probably have to try sharing things in a way that users would not consider it an add. But those lines would be quite blurry, without any clarification from the instance moderators.
I, myself, have very limited time availability, and I really doubt I would have enough technical knowledge to set up an instance myself. I am also already running 2 discord communities… so right now running an instance on top of that is just not an option. That leaves me I guess just to wait and see if someone else creates something like that. Risking blurring lines on instance rules, investing my time and energy into a community that will likely ban me isn’t particularly appealing either :(.
That makes a lot of sense, hosting an instance is definitely not for everyone. But from what @[email protected] posted, it seems things like that would be allowed here. But it might be a good idea to bring this up in [email protected] That is the general lemmy.world community, there we can get input from the instance admins.
Well, based on the linked rules, I guess it should be fine here.
Great idea about bringing it up in lemmyworld for the admins! I might actually do that tomorrow! Thanks!
One direction to take this conversation is to legitimize a formal ads platform and move the technology in that direction. It’s not a concept that has had airtime in federated social(open source, anti-corporate and all) but it fits into the model of enthusiast communities to have a magazine that is “both articles and ads”.
I think that for many users, the situation is not that different compared to back on Reddit, even there sharing things as a Creator was accepted, but only in a limited and reasonable way. Often subreddits required you to share some new free assets, and in that post you could then also promote your Patreon or store. But those assets should be high quality and usable, and not low effort or unusable stuff that is just used as an add.
Sharing Kickstarts is probably more difficult, I guess within the right community that would be fine. But except for the few larger kickstarters by the very large Creators, most D&D players would definitely consider those adds.
I am actually talking specifically about high quality free items that we frequently give to the community, and post our Patreons, shops etc along with them. It does not sound to me that would be allowed here, right? The instance itself prohibits ads.
So I am interested to see what the community thinks about it, given that none of that stuff will ever be permitted here, looks like.
I am making some assumptions based on some of your other answers, so please correct me if I am wrong.
I love independent creators, especially when they are generous enough to hand out some free content. It certainly wasn’t free to create! I would love to have engaged creators in any community.
However, it seems like you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what community engagement should look like. A bunch of posts talking about your products even with some freebies thrown in isn’t community engagement, it’s advertising.
A better way would be to respond to questions asking for recommendations with info about your products, while also disclosing that you are the author, or maybe even someone else’s product of that might be a better fit for their needs.
An even better way to engage is to respond to other people already recommending your products with a thanks and some links to your latest freebies or a note about a upcoming release/Kickstarter.
If you want to be a part of the community then be a part of it, don’t just view it as a marketing opportunity. The key is that you shouldn’t only be here to sell your stuff.
Apologies I somehow missed this thread. We are working on a solution to this issue at the moment and will be posting about it very soon. TLDR yes you will be able to self promote, with some caveats on how you go about doing that. This will make more sense soon so please stay tuned.
