Don't be a vote connoisseur here please. Redefine how you think about voting and participating.
Do you miss your communities from elsewhere. Well guess what, you are that core community now. If you want it back, the only thing holding you back is you. Don't wait on someone else to start posting. You don't need to worry about the perfect polished quality of your content or if it has been done before elsewhere. The current bar is, umm, poorly defined. No one is judging you. Call it practice. EVERY time you see something interesting, get in the habit of posting it please. Maybe go out of your way to grab a reference or two and post them.
Along these lines, think of how unsure and uncomfortable this may seem to most of us former lurker connoisseurs. You can play hard and thick skinned all you want, but you know exactly what post or comment you posted elsewhere that got the most votes or interaction. Why? Because it matters to you. So upvote everything you can. It matters to someone else too. Don't upvote just for the value or interest you have in the content. Do it just to say "hey, thanks for making the effort to participate and make this place a few lines longer." Please rethink how you handle voting, at least for now, think of a down vote as FU for participating, no votes as I wish you weren't here. We are all likely accustomed to a lot more interaction and validation in our own little niches. This is really an underpinning value of social media, we are here to engage with people, so tell people who are new and unsure about a new and different place, "hey, thanks for participating." You may not know or really appreciate their interests, but you can help us grow a core that can evolve into your favorite niches as the community grows. You are the core community. We can all make it grow if we make it a place people want to be.
Sometimes it can be very difficult to create a community and start posting stuff. I'm talking about meme content or comic content, like those in r/polandball, r/funny, etc.
Obviously it's a beginning, and all beginnings can be tough. But lacking creativity is tougher.
Although I appreciate your support, and you're absolutely right. Anything is better than lurking.
Look on the bright side: Now nothing is a repost. That folder of dumb meme PNGs you had? None of them have been posted.
OMG! You are right. It’s my time to shine!
To be honest, I've never created any meme. I'm creatively and artistically too dumb. I don't know where people create those memes either, like old rage comics or the bearded guy and the bald guy.
A lot of them that are following a familiar format, like “African kid looking suspiciously at photographer” have template generators people use. Yes, memes are so routine that they have become partially automated.
Think of this like your new bookmarks.
Like I have a bunch of stuff saved on Infinity and elsewhere. I just need to weed through what I want to save, extract the reference and post them here.
You could do the same with memes; put together a collection of your favorites and post them here to get started. Don't flood anywhere with a bunch of stuff in a day or self promotion nonsense linking to proprietary sites that pay you when you should post to peertube or odysee, (evil glance at others in a small room).
I assume people are still browsing all of Lemmy from time to time when their subscriptions lack new interesting content. If you post a lot in a short time it will annoy people. Habitually posting 1-3 items a day would be enough to motivate others to eventually follow in kind.
If you think about it like a bookmarking, max-browser-open-tabs-tester type, just keeping up with the latest and saving them here once in awhile, you'll be lurking in your own community creation aftermath in no time.