this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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memes
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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
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Did we run out of memes? Did we circle back to the start?
I has a bucket
About that...
Its ok.
Life goes on, people and things grow and die.
... but Minazo, Minazo will always can haz bucket.
This isn’t even close to the beginning.
The word meme was coined in the 70s to describe social phenomena of the time years before fax, email, or general internet memes became the norm.
Meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in the Selfish Gene (1976), where he meant to make an analogy between how...
....well, genes basically operate as a self replicating instruction set via things like plants and animals... or virii / viruses.
In that sense, we live in a gene-world, where genes perpetuate themselves, spread and grow and are the primary drivers of dramatic change and growth and collapses.
But ideas, notions, attitudes, philosophies... these become powerful enough once they are embodied by biology capable of contemplating them and acting on them, at scale, that they can actually override genes as the fundamental driver of change in the eco/biospehere, and they also propogate and essentially vie for dominance or prevalence amongst each other in similar ways as genes do.
So... 'meme', because it sounds close to 'gene', and also because of similar sounding roots in greek, 'mimesis' essentially meaning 'behavioral imitation'.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/meme
'Meme' itself was not widely used outside of basically academia untill it gained a more specific meaning in the roughly the late 90s / early 2000s, as referring to a kind of (usually goofy) image or video that spread virally across the online world.
To my knowledge, you did not broadly have people emailing each other goofy ascii art in the 80s and referring to that as a meme, nor widely or within a niche subculture referring to any kind of idea or cultural craze of the time... certainly at no where near the scale and popularity of the term nowadays.
If you wanted a meme from roughly the time that the term 'meme' was being broadly popularized to mean 'online internet joke image', you'd be looking at basically demotivational posters.
I get what you are saying but even by that criteria I would still go back to the dancing baby gif, I Will Survive alien, the Happy Hamster Dance, or like something else from that time period.
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I mean he is pretty long
HTTP 414 in the wild!
The original, the legend.
Damn, I’m old.
The ancient one awakens
Holy shit! An actual meme! Not just some text on a fucking picture!
It's literally just some text on a picture...?
It is one of the necessary conditions for a meme, but it is not sufficient.
A meme is any reusable, repeated format, literally speaking. You're just gatekeeping.
Hey, if grandpa is old enough to recognize this one, he probably remembers the attempts by /b/ users to find some definition of "meme" (or at least internet memes) that excluded the garbage that reddit popularized to the point of ending up being shared by "normies" on facebook.
I get it, it used to be important to me too. Gatekeeping was the point for a lot of people who defined themselves by membership to a sort of secret internet "in-club" when they didn't fit into any groups or cliques irl. At least, that was the case with me like 18 years ago or so.
It was never about the literal definition, but about making a definition for "internet in-joke" to create lines of separation between the in-group and the out-group.
At one point, "meme" was only synonymous with those rage faces. This was the 9gag days. It really grinded my gears. And this was indeed caused by normies adopting the term.
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If it has not been imitated / repeated it's literally not a meme. That's not gatekeeping, it's observing a definition.
You have even agreed with me in your definition. Posting a random picture with some text on it that you made that has imitated nothing is not a meme, it's just a picture with text on it.
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Whenever someone says 'om nom' I imagine the sound emanating from this cat eating a cheeseburger.
Remember the good one days? Back in 2011, when we stayed up till 2am laughing at r/F7U12, Caturday Memes, and 60s Spider-Man.
Back when the memes were original and funny:
2011? Get off my lawn whippersnapper! I was lurking chan sites in 07 when I should have been underageb& and having a remotely decent time in highschool.
No one cries for EFG. His name has been long forgotten.
Seriously, I'm pretty certain EFG was the progenitor to f7u12, and 4chan was pissed that reddit kept stealing their memes and beating them until nothing but a horse shaped hole in the ground remained as reddit kept growing. Pretty sure I witnessed the first advice animal threads too. That little pup with the rainbow background was spammed to hell and back for around a month before it made its way to reddit.
removes onion from belt
holds it up toward a cloud in the sky
begins to clench onion-
... No. No.
Eh, howdy partner, you remember Digg?
Does anyone remember Digg?
... Remember when triforcing became a thing?
... Remember 4chan before the V for Vendetta mask got associated with it?
gaze drifts back toward onion
... Pepperidge ... farm... remembers...
grins strangely
SUDDENLY FIRES MAH LAZOR AAAUGH WAHRBARGBL!
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And you get off my lawn...
All your base are belong to us...
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he returned when we needed him most
Goddamnit.
I have seen this thousands of times, but this time, this particular time, for some reason...
The goddamned cheeseburger song from VeggieTales is now the soundtrack to my brain.
Was at a cat cafe with my kids not too long ago. They had this breed of cat and it was being very affectionate with me and my son. So I say to her "you, you can haz cheeseburger" and my son (9 y/o) looks at me and asks "is that a reference to something?" So I pull out my phone and show him The Sacred ~~Jedi~~ Internet Texts
Ahh simpler times.
Repost
Not Even Doom Music
Darmok and Jahlaad at Tanagra.
Archeologist: Close analysis of pixels in this artifact will tell us that it belongs to the late AOL/early digg.com era.
blast from the paste
History must never be forgotten in all things
#NeverForget
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