Welcome to the wholesome side of the internet!

Four months ago, a new Reddit community called r/wholesomememes was born. Since then, over 275,00 325,000 people have joined, making it one of the fastest-growing new communities on the site (and one of today’s trending subreddits).

“When we first created the sub,” founding redditor u/Poppwall writes, “we used ‘Internet for the Spirit’ as the title, and I think it’s still very fitting.”

On September 17, 2016, the self-described “freshly 20-year-old college student from Pennsylvania” formed r/wholesomememes, submitting this photo as the inaugural post:

Given the community’s explosive popularity since then, it may come as a surprise that its founder had never started a subreddit before. Prior to r/wholesomememes, u/Poppwall primarily used Reddit to follow sports.

“I’ve had my account for 5 years, I think, but I’ve only heavily used it for the past year or so, mostly to keep up on basketball,” he explains. “Shout out r/NBA and r/sixers #trusttheprocess.”

After seeing scattered examples of wholesome memes on other sites, however, he decided to create a home for them on Reddit “to encourage the creation of more wholesome memes and to offer a dependable place for people to come and find and celebrate new wholesome content.”

If you’re not familiar with “wholesome memes,” the mod team offers this helpful definition of the term:

whole·some meme \ˈhōl-səm\ \mēm\ (n.): a meme that promotes health or well-being of body, mind, and/or soul

a meme that is pure of heart, devoid of corruption or malice, modest, stable, virtuous, and all-around sweet and compassionate

a meme that conveys support, positivity, compassion, understanding, love, affection, and genuine friendship by re-contextualizing classic meme formats, and using them to display warmth and empathy

a meme with no snark or sarcasm that displays genuine human emotion and subverts a generally negative meme to be more positive

To get a feel for what sorts of memes promote the well-being of your body, mind, and soul, here are a few popular examples:

“Our community,” he summarizes, “is a place where people can come to enjoy unabashed kindness in a familiar format.”

According to u/Poppwall, subscribers fall into one main demographic: “People who want to celebrate the good in their lives. Hopefully that’s everybody, but we have the ones that like memes.”

Like many new subreddits, r/wholesomememes relied primarily on posts from the community’s founding members to keep it populated with new content in its early days.

“[Co-founder] u/ilegalimigrants and I spent our time editing popular memes in MS Paint to make them wholesome and asking other subs for advice,” he shares.

“Eventually more members joined our community and then u/VileVial accepted my invite to join the moderating team and bailed us out in CSS, moderation legwork, and our ground rules. After he did that work, we really gained traction. I can’t thank him enough.”

Even with other redditors pitching in to help establish the new sub, many users who stumbled upon it didn’t know what to make of it.

“Initially, people were unsure whether we were adding another layer of irony to the memes we were coopting or if we were genuinely as wholesome as we said, and that debate was vital in attracting people to our community,” u/Poppwall explains.

“I remember how much reaching 100 subscribers shocked me—I think u/ilegalimigrants and I set our expectations at around a dozen subscribers.”

At the one-month mark, r/wholesomememes reached 4,368 subscribers. The next month, it hit 57,102. And after three months, the subscriber count totaled 169,640, making it the largest generator of wholesome memes on the internet.

The community’s growth is mirrored in posts from r/MemeEconomy, where users first wondered if wholesome memes could “become a thing,” then predicted a surge in popularity, noted their versatility, and eventually decided they were a “rock-solid investment.”

The community spawned a number of offshoot subreddits like r/wholesomegifs and r/wholesomecomics, collectively dubbed “The Wholesome Network,” and became the subject of several posts on r/OutOfTheLoop, an unofficial badge of true fame on Reddit.

“Also being featured in Cosmopolitan was rad,” u/Poppwall adds. “Shout out Cosmo.”

While u/Poppwall jokes that the subreddit is a “scheme to recruit a quarter of a million kind internet strangers to mass produce compliments I can use in real life,” the consistent, month-over-month growth of the community has been a recurring source of curiosity on Reddit.

One explanation points to the negativity and cynicism surrounding the end of 2016—with a constant stream of news around the U.S. presidential election and seemingly never-ending series of beloved celebrities who passed away—but u/Poppwall believes the real answer is much broader:

I’ve seen a lot of people theorize that it’s a reactionary thing—that 2016 has really worn on people and that they need a respite. Personally, I believe that our community isn’t a reaction but instead represents something basic that hasn’t really been as accessible online. There’s a stereotype of going online to argue with people but we wouldn’t have the internet if we didn’t primarily want to share with each other. People browse Reddit, Twitter, etc. because they want to learn about and share with others, and the memes we see are great because they’re inside jokes that we can laugh at with people across the world. Lately, memes have been depressing and self-deprecating and I think lots of people have tried to change their understanding of themselves so that they can relate, but internally everybody wants to be happy and love themselves. Our community has grown quickly because our memes represent that ubiquitous human quality and internally we recognize the power that the internet has on our self-image and our memes enable people to feel good about themselves.

This sense of positivity now permeates the community, from their attitude towards each other’s posts…

… to their thoughts on the New Year.

Recently, some redditors in r/wholesomememes have taken to posting screenshots of comments from other subreddits to highlight moments of “wholesomeness” outside of their community:

NSFWholesome from wholesomememes

And at the end of last year, moderator u/Noerdy initiated a new tradition for the community: “Find a Friend” threads, in which users are invited to post comments with a few of their interests for the express purpose of “encourag[ing] conversation starting and social interaction online.”

The first thread received over 2,500 comments.

When asked what he hopes to see from r/wholesomememes in 2017, u/Poppwall offers a candid response. “I’m not sure truthfully. The past three months have been unreal. Default sub or bust, I guess.”

In the meantime, he welcomes anyone who hasn’t visited the community to check it out and, hopefully, join in the wholesomeness.

“Stop by! We’d love to have you subscribe but we won’t force you to! Also, stay hydrated!”