Geeze, who do you think these guys are, ski jumpers?

Think more along the lines of a garden. If you want to create an environment that’s suitable for something like vegetables to grow, you’re also going to be creating an environment for lots of other plants to thrive. Why clear out and till a plot for tomatoes if you’re just going to let the kudzu grow over it again?

Not necessarily. Something like a new advice animal or a deep fried meme can be entirely novel, but still derive meaning from the context of existing memes.

While every meme has to start from nothing, expanding the community scope to “any thought that can be shared” makes it so broad as to be meaningless.

Shamelessly stolen from wikipedia: “Two fundamental characteristics of internet memes are creative reproduction and intertextuality.”

I’m other words, memes have to derive substantial meaning from its overall positioning in Internet culture.

As an example, this post derives most of its context and meaning from horror movies, outside of Internet culture.

This meme, however derives its visual elements from a tv show, but these have been recursively co-opted by Internet culture, and is further embellished with internet-centric experiences (steam friend activity).

In a more hypothetical approach, imagine a news headline with the subtitle “I FUCKING KNEW IT!” A headline like “rising home prices linked to decreased fertility” would not really be a meme, but one like “tube breach causes historically large Internet outage” would. Both posts are materially similar, and either could be a meme in differing circumstances of Internet culture, but context is everything.

“the community will do what it do” isn’t really a solution. It seems the majority of engagement comes from inattentive front page readers. You can see this in a lot of Lemmy communities. People cruise in and post generic content, generic content gets upvoted to the top. Every community just ends up moving towards generic content over time without moderation.

Which leads to the question of why even have themed communities?