ThistleArts🏳️‍⚧️🎨🔞Aug 23, 2023

Let’s say it loud and clear:

There’s nothing wrong with promoting your small business, your art, books, your services on mastodon or any other social media.

Self promotion is not an ad!

It’s being part of a community.

People have to do it. Other people might need and want the good stuff their community members might offer.

Mutual support and buying from your community members is good, wholesome and necessary.

Boost if you agree, so creators feel welcomed to self promote here
#mastoart

Show thread🪨
@ThistleArts I'll be a bit more controversial and say: self promotion is an ad.

And that's OK. Advertisment is how projects get visibility, without it they would not be viable.

The problem is when ads become intrusive. That can be by using your personal data to target you, by sending you unsolicited emails, impersonating content you are subscribed to (whether it is "suggested" posts on social medias or sponsored segments on videos) or simply polluting your visible space (ad banners and popups).

Promoting your work on social medias is letting people who follow you know about it, which is cool. As long as you don't intrude on people who don't want it.
Aug 23, 2023 at 3:24pmWeb
Show threadThistleArts🏳️‍⚧️🎨🔞Aug 23, 2023

@Varpie I absolutely agree with that.
And I'm not talking about intrusive self-promotion here. I'm talking about people writing "hey, I've got this art print on sale in my store" or "hey, i've got this book coming out" on their social media.

Which should never be scolded or thrown upon. It should be encouraged.

Most creative people I know are the opposite of those who spam people with self promo.
They struggle to post about their store more than once.

Show threadloriAug 24, 2023
@Varpie @ThistleArts this is more or less how I feel. It is an ad, 100% it's an ad. Different people have different feelings about different levels of ad. Not all ads are the same. Some people don't tolerate any ads and I think that's a boundary people are allowed to draw where they want it. But most people don't mind this type of ad, where an artist who established themselves in a community shares what they make. I don't think calling it an ad is in conflict with that and I don't think it's unfair to use the word ad, "ad" doesn't have to mean "blinking banner ad that sends me to malware" or "30 second youtube commercial for the worst channels you've ever heard of". People are generally unbothered by seeing an ad for their local coffee shop, but annoyed at seeing the same ad for some AliExpress cleaning gadget every two seconds.