I had this discussion with a friend, and we really couldn’t reach a consensus.
My friend thinks Lemmy (and other Reddit-like platforms) is social media because you’re interacting with other people, liking/disliking submissions, and all the content is user-generated.
I think it isn’t because you’re not following individual people, just communities/topics. Though I concede there are some aspects of social media present, I feel that overall it’s not because my view of social media is that you’re primarily following individuals.
In my view, these link aggregator + comment platforms are more like an evolution of forums which both my friend and I agreed don’t meet the criteria to be considered social media (though they maintain that Reddit-like platforms are social media while I do not).
So I’m asking Lemmy now to weigh in to help settle this friendly debate.
Edit: Thanks everyone! From the comments, it sounds like my friend and I are both right and both wrong. lol. Feel free to keep chiming in, but I have to go do the 9-5 thing that pays my mortgage and cloud hosting bills.
I think you’re both right. It’s really a semantic argument over what ‘social’ means in the phrase ’social network’.
For me I tend to agree with your interpretation. I suspect it’s because the phrase came into popular use(see Google Trend screenshot below) and in reference to the Xengas, MySpaces, and Facebooks of the world that were user-centric rather than the forums and BBS type paradigms that were more topic centric.
If it is like writing on toilet walls,
then it is social media.I prefer to think of them as antisocial media.