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I hear it is very effective to dm people on discord and politely asking them to try your game.

Joking aside, if you try to promote your game yourself you face two  challenges. It is a hen and egg problem. To promote your game you need followers on your social media.  But you will not get followers if you promote an unknown game. So you try to advance the recognition of your game and of your social media ... by each other. If you could make one popular, it could promote the other one. But this places you on square one. How to promote your social media channels.

There is no true answer to this. If there were a working recipe for this, every dev would be known and every youtuber/instagram star would be famous.  Bascially you cannot apply what any successful dev/influencer did. It is after the fact. And lots of luck. Enough money can help this of course, that is what advertising is and it costs money for a reason.

It helps to have a very good game and to be not too bland. You can try to  be visible and findable for people looking for your content. If you were to have a platformer, tough. There are over 100k platformer games on itch. There are literally over 100 games here that are named Tetris here. Of the 1.4k games tagged Tetris only 70 games are tagged platformer. Whatever a    platformer tetris is  supposed to be. And whoever would search in that combination outside of making a point. But those 70 games are findable for the tetris loving platformer enthusiast.

There are lots of forums, some even allow  a little promotion. As a single newbie dev you cannot compete with seasoned devs and companies. But you can try to be found by people that would actually look for games like yours.

Put yourself in a gamer's shoes. Where do you go to find your indie games? And how? Do you hang out on Twitter and search indie hashtag?

Of course it is not a bad idea to have as many social media as you can reasonably manage and update with your stuff. But as I said, influcencers have the same problem. Minus the game development.