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?
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.
Right now they just have it as the watermark and in the hyperlink as the source. They don't even mention it in the text of the post. I think that's definitely fine, but I guess we'll need to wait for the admin to weigh in