If you really want entire lemmy instances to be 100% meme-free, the mods would have a lot to do because they'd have to read through every last post and comment.

Just like not every picture with text in white Impact with black outlines is a meme (it has to be established as such), memes aren't only pictures with text in white Impact font with black outlines. In fact, they aren't always pictures. They can just as well be text, embedded in other text.

Any catchphrase can be a meme. Snowclones are memes, too. Snowclones are the memes of the analogue era. They date back to the analogue era, to the mainstream media of the 1970s, the 1960, the 1950s, as far back as William Shakespeare, as far back as ancient Rome, and I'm pretty sure there are snowclones from ancient Greece.

I can't imagine the mods of any one Lemmy instance reading through all posts and all comments and sanctioning everyone who has dared to use a decades-old snowclone in it.

(Whoever finds a meme in this comment may keep it.)

As a community grows in popularity, it often shifts from hosting insightful discussions to attracting memes, funny, and low-quality content.

Seems the simplest thing would be to start a parallel memes community. So, for example, if it was an issue on !movies@lemm.ee we'd look into a movie memes community and those that don't want memes can just block it.

This is kind of up to the individual community, not the instance as a whole. An instance theoretically could make a general 'No memes on any community on this instance' rule but it would be awful to enforce, and it'd be easier to leave it up to communities.

That said, I think Lemmy is a long way off from having the userbase or popularity to create that problem, and the absence of karma or any analogue really narrows the impact. Personally, I've seen significantly less low-effort content here than on Reddit, with the exception of a few specific communities that exist for that purpose specifically.

Someone should make a meme out of this!

There's Usenet, no memes but also sort of dead and suffering from spam

My theory is that memes made the internet worse but nobody wants to talk about. If I were getting my masters in behavioral science, I would be studying the impact of memes on Internet culture.

Oh honey...

Lemmy is not nearly large enough to fall victim to that.

Plus we don't have the financial incentives to allow it. Reddit turned Karma-farming into a literal business model.

There's a github issue request to solve this:

Add a local user setting to filter out image / meme posts, similar to NSFW filtering https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4988

This is not a matter for instance admins but for proper community moderation.

Growth accelerates

Seems to be a nice problem to have

!newcommunities@lemmy.world for people looking for active communities

For the most part memes are self contained to their own communities. It takes a few days but you can achieve a relatively meme free experience if you block each community.

I guess the closest experience you can get is if you'll just block all meme communities

Idk if you can do it on Lemmy, but on MBin you can block communities (magazines)

Think of an instance like a vehicle (bicycle, train, car, airplane, etc.) while the content (posts) is the destination, which I guess makes the communities the city streets that arrange the content for easily going from one to the next. Anyway, the instance takes you “there” (wherever you want to go), but you can get there from most instances, or you can even make your own instance, so deciding your ultimate destination is not a great feature of choosing an instance (it's actually much more complicated than that, but to a first degree of approximation that much is true - you can pretty much access meme communities from any instance, or block those communities regardless of which instance you are on, as you choose).

At first there seems to be some exceptions, like startrek.website, but there too it's just a convenience factor - you can subscribe to those communities from anywhere (that federates with it, e.g.lemmy.world) - or you can be on the startrek.website instance but block every one of those local communities (if you wanted) and instead post and comment all across the Fediverse in other communities.

So it's not proper to look at the instance level for a solution to this issue. And as for the community level, setting aside the communities dedicated to memes on purpose, the prime issue of memes appearing everywhere seems to be moderation or more apropos lack of it. If you wanted to start a serious community, about e.g. philosophical discussions (which already exists btw - press the community button and search to find several), then you could put in the actual effort to keep out such lower-effort content that you do not like to see. And if you do not like it, surely there are others who think the same. But somebody, somewhere is going to have to expend the effort to make it happen, or else it simply won't.

Also here's a fascinating essay on the subject: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb. Reading that is a large part of what made me leave Reddit, and almost Lemmy as well, but being forewarned is forearmed so now that I know, I can limit myself and be alright with how I use social media. It's a really good read!

If only we had a time machine. We could go back to 1998 and assassinate Joe Meme before he ever invented the damn things. That's what I would do. Oh and take care of baby Hitler.

Tildes fits that description. The posts are text-only or links to websites. No memes.

I use that site in addition to Lemmy, not as a replacement but a supplement. It's just a different flavor of discussion.

It's invite-only but I can give you an invitation code if you're interested. Take a look, see if you like it, and send me a private message if you want an invitation.

Insert surprised_pikachu.jpg

karma farm???

block the perps, then the sub

Farmers will be farmers. I couldn’t play dust ii for a long time because everybody was farming on a casual server. Like get a job bruh.

Lotide doesn't support images at all, but development stopped for that pretty recently.

It's pretty stable and both narwhal.city and dev.narwhal.city are still running though. I can give you an invite to narwhal.city if you want.