Know Your Meme (KYM) is a long-established platform that documents and researches internet memes, viral videos, catchphrases, and more. It uses a hybrid model of community wiki-style contributions and professional editorial oversight, making it a rich historical archive of online culture. Originally part of Rocketboom in 2007, KYM was later acquired by Cheezburger Network (2011) and then Literally Media (2016). It’s even recognized by the U.S. Library of Congress.
However, as comprehensive and useful as KYM is, it’s still a centralized platform. That centralization limits control, transparency, and long-term resilience, especially when meme culture itself thrives in decentralized, community-driven spaces.
This got me thinking: has anyone ever considered a decentralized and federated alternative to KYM? Something built on the ActivityPub protocol (like Lemmy, Peertube, Mastodon, etc.), where communities could:
Document and archive memes in a federated, self-hosted way
Vote on or curate meme entries collaboratively
Link meme evolution across different cultural and regional instances
Provide transparency around edits, sourcing, and moderation
Preserve meme culture beyond the control of a single corporate entity
A federated “MemePedia” of sorts could better reflect the chaotic, democratic nature of meme creation and diffusion online.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the technical skill or time to build this myself, but I’d love to discuss the idea, see if anyone else has thought along similar lines, or maybe even hear about any existing initiatives.
What do you think?
Is this something worth attempting?
Why would anyone need this? Federation isn’t the solution to everything.
Any wiki would work for this. @[email protected] is developing a federated wiki called ibis that is quite far along now.
^
Like… a wiki for memes? Some already exist AFAIK, even though they aren’t fully decentralized per se.
The problem is you need people documenting this stuff, like KYM presumably pays their staff to do, and good SEO/marketing to snag critical mass. That is a tall order for a volunteer Fediverse project of this nature, I think, as keeping up is many full time jobs.
Technically easy. A baseline wiki is not a particularly complicated application.
The challenge, as always, is shifting the user base, especially content writers, when starting from a small knowledge base. You would need to offer a significantly better experience - or KYM would need to suffer serious enshittification - to have a real hope of doing that.
IMO the one feature that might make an alternative stand out is contextual knowledge surfacing. In other words, if a meme is mentioned in content somewhere, the explanation is automatically made available to the reader without needing to leave the current site/page. Kinda like how some glossary systems work, or Viva Topics before MS stupidly killed it.
