Submitted 1 day ago by Proprietary_Blend@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Not the way I use it. I’m here to get news and entertainment. Without Lemmy, I would just do it piecemeal instead of coming to one place. There definitely is a social aspect but would you call YouTube social media? There is a comment section there too.
I do think an argument could be made, but it’s not in my opinion.
Yes.
Yes, because this isn't just Lemmy.
Lemmy itself is more like a forum or old Reddit. A focus on discussion and link aggregation, not people. I personally still consider it social media, but there are enough people who draw the line there. Like others said, it depends on how YOU define social media.
But this is the fediverse, not just Lemmy. I'm writing this from Mbin, which has a much bigger focus on people (you can follow users here). But you can also talk here from Mastodon. Then there's platforms like Friendica, afaik the Facebook of the fediverse, which theoretically also have access (though I have yet to see a user from there, so idk if they're functionally compatible with Lemmy).
Lemmy itself might or might not fit in isolation, but if an instance is connected to the fediverse, it's definitely indirectly a social network. ActivityPub (the protocol used to connect the fediverse) is explicitly a social networking protocol as per its spec.
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
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.
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.
Interesting question on the fediverse. I tend to think that redditlikes aren’t, while twitterlikes are; so what does it mean if they’re federated? Does it depend on how you access the content?
Maybe it’s a spectrum. Bulletin board forums are on one side, then Stack Overflow, then redditlikes, then twitterlikes, then Instagram-like image sharing, then Facebook on the far other side.
Antisocial Media
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 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.
in fact, I follow several Lemmy accounts, and I can directly follow your account as well, right from the web interface.
Is there any point to following Lemmy users though? Like, unlike the rest of the fediverse, Lemmy doesn't send any posts to followers. They just exist, don't actually receive anything. Is there even any point to it then?
I use it to follow several ladies who post to multiple communities on lemmynsfw.com.
I don’t think the any interaction definition is too broad at all. Primitive forms of social media such as mailing lists and forum threads form are very similar in functionality to simply following hashtags, or I guess whatever the algorithms suggest.
The distinction using account based versus conversation/thread based is not too helpful, because the majority of users of modern social media don’t really use it to follow accounts, with the majority of their time is spent doomscrolling generic hashtags or algorithm recommendations.
The similarities are easier to see if you think of how people actually used these technologies in their daily lives. Pre Facebook, people would log in and refresh their Usenet, emails, and forums threads to keep in touch with friends and interests. Post Facebook, people would log in and refresh Facebook/Insta instead.
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.
TabbsTheBat@pawb.social 1 day ago
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
squirrel@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Following topics instead of people. It’s so much better.
TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
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.