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?
This isn't a advertising platform, it's a community for discussion.
As a fellow artist, I'd love to say otherwise, but sometimes we have to admit that not all platforms are built for growing your art business. Sure, you can probably get away with plugging links to your patreon/etsy every time you share your work, but you're not going to get very much revenue from it. You'll be squeezing a square block into a triangular hole.
It's not that artists aren't welcome, it's just that the threadiverse (and reddit by extension) wasn't designed for the purposes you're describing, so you're not going to find the success you're looking for. There's nothing wrong with finding another platform that suits your needs better.