When I was able to work, I liked to pretend that Reddit - which was still reasonable back then - wasn’t social media to get around the rule that social media wasn’t allowed. I had intended to explain that I thought Facebook, LinkedIn and possibly Twitter were social. Since I didn’t have friends or follows on Reddit, and since I was anonymous, clearly it didn’t count.
I was never called out on it.
But I definitely thought, and still think, that there’s definitely a social element to it. I mean, what’s happening right now?
This isn’t Reddit, of course, but it amounts to the same thing. I’m responding to something written by a human who might actually read it. Conversations happen in the comments. As far as Internet goes, that’s social.
Thats a good rule of thumb i think it is social in a sense like a forum or BBS is social in that it’s a communication platform but its not a parasocial platform like twitter, Facebook, instagram, and even Mastodon etc.
Depends on how you define social media.
Some people say it refers to any online social interaction platform, including forums, Usenet, IRC, and even email; the logical conclusion of this point of view is that the phone network is social media, and one can make the case that so is the postal service. This definition strikes me as too broad; I feel like it was dreamt up by people who have never known a world without facebook.com and try to force predecessors into a bucket where they don’t belong.
Personally, I would define social media as online communication systems which are account-oriented rather than conversation-oriented. Forums and pre-web communication systems are conversation-oriented. Yes, you have an account on a forum, but the forum is structured around threads. You can get notified of replies to a thread, and you might be able to follow individual threads, but you don’t follow individual accounts. Same with Usenet; there are some workarounds to follow individual people, but the entire network is based around threads. IRC doesn’t even need an account.
Social media is all about accounts; the whole idea is that you follow individual people rather than threads. I would further divide social media into post-based and file-based. Post-based social media is built around text posts. Replies to posts are the same as the post they reply to. Posts can have other media attached, but are still text posts with pictures, videos, or sound files stuck on. This includes MySpace, Facebook, the website formerly known as Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, BlueSky, Mastodon, Sharkey, Akkoma, Friendica, Threads.net, and so forth.
In file-based social media, posts consist of non-text files; responses and replies to posts are not the same as the posts themselves. This is things like YouTube, PeerTube (video), Instagram, Pixelfed (pictures), and Castopod (audio files).
ActivityPub allows post-based and file-based social media to interact with each other. Somebody can post a video with PeerTube, and get replies with Mastodon and Sharkey.
Then there’s what might be called the Slashdot model, which covers Slashdot, Fark, Digg, Reddit, Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed, and Substrings. Reddit is an interesting case of something which was not originally social media, but became social media when the people in charge added the ability to follow individual accounts, and have been trying their darndest to add in more and more features from traditional social media.
And that brings us to the threadiverse. Threadiverse programmes are built on ActivityPub, the same protocol that powers Mastodon, Sharkey, Akkoma, Friendica, PeerTube, and Pixelfed, all of which are social media. You use Lemmy, specifically, lemmy.world, and posted this question to a community on the same instance. Lemmy does not currently allow users to follow individual accounts, and thus under my definition, it does not qualify as social media.
However. I use Mbin, and thus I would refer to @NoStupidQuestions@lemmy.world as a magazine rather than a community. (Actually, I mostly use Mastodon, but I’m posting this with my Mbin account). Mbin does allow users to follow individual accounts; in fact, I follow several Lemmy accounts, and I can directly follow your account as well, right from the web interface. I could also follow your account with my Mastodon account. This means that even if Lemmy fails the definition of social media, it looks and acts just like social media to a bunch of things that do.
So is Lemmy social media? Honestly, yeah, I’d say so. Maybe it isn’t social media to Lemmy users, but it is to most of the rest of the Fediverse.
![A screenshot of TheBrainBin.org, an Mbin instance. Specifically, it's a post in the magazine NoStupidQuestions@lemmy.world, asking "Is This Social Media", posted by @Proprietary_Blend@lemmy.world. The user has moused over OP's username, which has brought up a popup. The popup shows various information and options. Most pertinently to this discussion, there is a [Follow] button, which allows the person viewing the popup to directly follow Proprietary_Blend.](https://media.thebrainbin.org/69/f8/69f817617450be1a7878e7991537a53085d9c6917334bd04efac1876f1aa094f.png)
Yes and no. Depends on how you define it
You interact with others digitally on here, which makes it social, but some would argue that it’s a forum aggregate which isn’t a true social media, since it’s moreso used for discussion or support, rather than posting about personal affairs
One of the broadest definitions I’ve seen included email. People don’t really think of it as a social media, but it fits the description.
This highlights the problem with binary definitions — they rarely fit in the real world. Like, where do you draw the line between religion and way of life/philosophy/etc. Same thing here. If you look at the list of things that are commonly considered social medias, you can derive some rules from them. As usual, applying the rules leads to some bizarre classifications where email gets labeled as a social media or Lemmy gets excluded or whatever.
Real life is messy, and doesn’t fit neatly into a binary box. Sone tentacle will always peak out from some of the corners, holes or cracks.
Following topics instead of people. It’s so much better.
Since so many people are here because they consider the other platforms to be too enshittified, I like calling Lemmy “Antisocial Media”
Which is not fitting because it’s much more social than something as superficial as Instagram - to me at least. Let’s call what we have here social media and the other stuff can be legacy, corporate or ad based social media which describes it much better.
I’m not your buddy, friend!
I’m not your friend, pal!
That sounds better
I would consider fediverse and forums, including lemmy as a form of social media. So the answer is yes
its Social media in the form of Aggretiated forums based on Interests rather.
Like this Lemmy sub here is No stupid questions a gather point for people asking and answer questions.
So you dont follow people here like lets say on twitter or instagram or tiktok , you rather follow topics / interests here.
There’s somewhat of a historical context, where there were forums at first, where people generally used pseudonyms. Then the broad wave of webpages originally dubbed “social media” happened, which wanted users to use their real names. In that context, Lemmy doesn’t feel like social media.
But the strong distinction for platforms to either be pseudonymous or prefer real identies somewhat seized to exist, because it’s not anymore novel to use your real identity on the internet. For example, TikTok has a mixture of folks showing their face, as well as completely anonymous uploaders.
Instead, the definition is becoming more about: Do you interact with other humans? Which is a definite yes for Lemmy.
No: you don’t follow “real identities”, it’s a forum, not a user generated feed of personal life details, the votes are not likes/dislikes of personal content, but upvotes and downvotes to indicate whether that post belongs in that forum or not. For the most part users are not generating any media at all, though they can (exactly like a forum). The basis of the site isn’t around following anyone or the content they’re generating, but instead subscribing to communities.
It’s only social media if your definition of social media is “people commenting on stuff” which would mean that almost every website on the planet is social media. Clearly one of these definitions is wrong and I don’t really understand how we got to the place where “commenting on stuff” made it social media when it’s clearly not.
Wikipedia strongly disagrees with your definition
I don’t give one shit what Wikipedia says. I’ve argued this on here before. Wikipedia’s definition includes every website on the planet because of how wide ranging and useless of a definition it is. Defining social media in that way makes the meaning useless and only serves politicians who want to block things they dislike on the internet. Essentially “social media” == internet to them.
You’re welcome to your whacky opinion. Just pointing out that it’s uniquely yours 🙂
But it’s not. Someone edited wikipedia to put a definition only cited in one business article from 2010. It was never the common definition until news companies started calling anything they didn’t understand “social media” because it became a catch all. Forums aren’t social media.
You’re pretending most people wouldn’t call Reddit social media. That’s absurd.
