A picture is worth a thousand words, but a meme is worth ten thousand words. This statement highlights the immense power that memes hold in our current digital age. Memes are the perfect example of how humor and creativity can come together to form a shared cultural experience that transcends borders and language barriers.
Memes have been a part of the online culture for a long time now. From the classic “I can has cheeseburger” cat to the more recent “distracted boyfriend” meme, these images have a way of capturing the essence of a cultural moment or idea in a humorous and relatable way.
For any community to grow and thrive, it needs to have its own unique characteristics and cultural norms. These norms evolve over time, and are eventually adopted by everyone in the community. A great example of this can be seen in the Bitcoin community, which has developed its own unique language and slang, such as “HODL,” “rekt,” and “fud.”
The Nostr community has also developed its own set of unique characteristics, such as the use of “Shaka” for likes, “nostriches” for profile pictures, and “PV” for good morning. As the community grew, creators on Nostr began creating and sharing their own memes and images.
To capture this unique culture and make it easily accessible to everyone in the community, we decided to create Nostr’s own repository of memes. This would allow anyone to reuse and spread the community’s unique humor and creativity.
While there are many popular repositories of memes available, such as Giphy, we felt that they needed their own repository to fully capture the essence of their community. We also came up with a creative way of acknowledging and supporting the creators who contributed their images to the repository using zaps.
PLEBHY is a micro App repository that catalogs popular gifs and stickers posted on nostr. To be included, creators simply put #plebhy hashtag on the messages and post them as note. Plebhy watch service will automagically scrub them for duplicates, content type and tag them into plebhy repository including the creator and post information.
If you are using Current App, then Plebhy service is already integrated into the App new post screen. Other clients such as snort.social are in the process of integrating it into their App. If your app is not supported, you can simply go to plebhy.com and search for the gifs or stickers you like. You can then copy the url directly and also Zap the creators directly.
Overall, the power of memes lies in their ability to bring people together and create a shared cultural experience. They have become an integral part of our digital communication, and will continue to evolve and adapt to our changing cultural landscape. The Nostr community is a great example of how memes can be used to establish a unique cultural identity and bring people together.
