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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • My purpose is to work out if Lemmy is social media, and solidify my position on it through debating (arguing) with people about it, I’m afraid I’m using you for my own ends 😉.

    My point about calling lemmy Wikipedia is like calling cereal soup. I agree, because if we widen this definition to include Lemmy, we start having justifications for calling things that clearly aren’t social media, social media.

    My ideal is that we just have old style Internet platforms in their own box called forums. And social media can continue on its way with phone number verification, blue check marks, and whatever else goes on.

    I suppose the actually productive thought process is to think why we need to differentiate sites from each other like this, and come up with a definition that has function without being confusing. I’d argue the endless debate and confusion around this topic, especially on Reddit, for years and years, indicates a poor definition.


  • Content curation and discussions sounds like Wikipedia to me, and honestly most information sites. As basically everything on the Internet is community driven by a small vanguard of committed posters. I guess we can just call all websites with social interaction social media.

    My issue is, to me, lemmy, 4chan, and old forums are completely different to Twitter, Facebook, bebo, Instagram, Snapchat, tiktok etc etc in look, form and function. But I think if we still are just calling them social media, and there is no consistent definition that also umbrellas most of the Internet, it seems silly at that point. Much easier to just not call lemmy social media.

    I could also argue people calling lemmy social media are trying to be contrarian and get a rise out of people. Like calling cereal, soup.


  • If the expression of opinion or interacting with that opinion is all it takes, then YouTube is social media, IMDb is social media. Blogs are social media, any news site is social media. It has to be more specific than that because every site has a comment section and it’s a pretty useless definition.

    I think the object of interest has to be people, and the engagement has to come from fixed personalities. Who develop a rapport. For example, you add friends and follow people, who you recognize, interact with and develop a social or parasocial relationship.

    Although Reddit has maybe gone that way in some respects, sites like YouTube (maybe) Lemmy, 4chan, Q&A sites (Quora, stack overflow), and more traditional forums have anonymous people jumping in and out, and the focus is the idea (meme, article, creation, question).

    Maybe we ditch the term altogether as everything is adding a social component and it will all devolve into a digital singularity.



  • They’re forums though, are forums social media? I don’t think services people use anonymously and not for the primary purpose of interacting are social media. The stat has always been 90+% of people are lurkers who just look at memes. Doesn’t sound very social. Scrolling lemmy and reading articles doesn’t get at that part of the brain. We’re not a social group, looking at each others lives.

    What stops being social media if we broaden the definition. YouTube is social media if Lemmy is imo.