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.

I think it's a massive forum.

I think of social media as Facebook where it's your real name and contacts who you interact with (primarily anyway).

But this is any number of topics you can go in and out of, with a huge array of strangers that you may or may not interact with again. More links, discussion, specialities.

You can get into precise definitions to force Lemmy/Reddit into social media, but I'm still forum.

I don't really think it matters to have some context-free definition. It certainly is very much like social media in a lot of ways, and even you seem to acknowledge that. Unless your friend is trying to compare reddit like apps to Facebook in ways it isn't like Facebook, how you label them doesn't matter.

Fell like it could be used as social media, but I tend to use it as a forum

Not exactly. Lemmy (like Reddit) is a social news/link aggregator. So it’s not social media per se, but it’s certainly social media adjacent.

I do not, while yes you can socialize I think it intended to be used as an aggregator unlike other sites. Much like you can discuss(forum) and shop in other social media sites.

Lemmy is social media. Reddit is sociopath media

I wouldn't want to associate this place with the garbage social media pits like Facebook and Instagram...

I liked the idea of calling it antisocial media, because it really is about building the opposite of what Facebook and Instagram is about.

I don't think they are. In my view, social media is either personal ( i.e. pictures on Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat ) or short + very mainstream ( Twitter, TikTok). Reddit has too many niches that collectively make up an enormous chunk of the platform, plus it is very anonymous. I'd argue that the same is true of YouTube, and a lot of the content is closer to TV and journalism.

I feel like it's similar to social media, but serves a different purpose at least in my use of it. With social media sites like Facebook and Instagram I'm mostly interacting with people I know in real life. To me it seems closer to Youtube, because for both of those it connects me more to larger cultural or artistic things, rather than what's going on with my friends.

Absolutely social media. On Facebook i mostly followed groups - cannabis, gardening, work related interests, local news, etc. Same as here.

It's all social media as the content of the site is generated by users interacting with each other.

The difference you've identified is between individualist & content-focused social media.

Most networks are the individualist kind, you follow people and they post about their lives for the most part

Reddit & lemmy are primarily content focused social media as you follow topics and post about them

So, I think forums are a form of social media, so trying to say this is a forum and not social media isn't a good argument for me.

No