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.

  • @paddirnEnglish
    4•8 months ago

    I agree that there is a difference in how sites like Facebook and Twitter operate vs Reddit and Lemmy, BUT I think they’re still both social media. One tends to emphasize personality and individuals more. You’re encouraged to Follow/Like/Subscribe to the people or accounts themselves. People are given big avatar images and/or profile pages, you can see who they’re following. The topics themselves aren’t as important, it’s more about, “What will Taylor Swift or Elon Musk say today?”. Individuals are given much more attention.

    Contrast that with Reddit/Lemmy/forums, where people are more or less reduced to a name, less-emphasized avatars and minimal profile pages. The topics themselves are emphasized and typically communities as a whole come together and do things as a group (meme wars and whathaveyou). The individual is less important and the communities/subreddits are more the “stars” of these sites. You’re encouraged more to Upvote/Downvote/Comment, so you’re interacting a little different, but it mostly just amounts to different terminology. I’ll admit though, the only person I’ve ever considered following on forum sites is u/Shittymorph. Just because his posts were so goddamn hilarious, but finding them in the wild was what made them so epic, reading all the way through only to discover…. “Goddamnit!”

    I think in both cases they’re still “social media”, but they are definitely in different categories and they emphasize different parts of the experience.