One of the broadest definitions I’ve seen included email in the list. 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 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.