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I feel like some people have forgotten what KIND of social media PieFed/Lemmy/Reddit even is
(toast.ooo)
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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That’s because they’re not social media. They’re forums. So it seems like you (op) didn’t know what kind they were in the first place.
It's more of a hybrid between forums and social media, but they're of type "link aggregator" or in other words, the whole point is to post articles and then have discussions about them.
When Reddit was just getting started all you could do was post links to articles, no pictures and people loved it for that. Pictures came later, but even then depended on those pics just being another link hosted somewhere else (that's where imgur came in) it was years before you could upload a picture direct to reddit
Yes which existed for decades before social media ever came about. Link aggregators and forums are their own thing and should never be classified with social media.
Forums are social media, too.
They are most definitely not. If forums are social media then your local news site is social media and I’m sure that’s not the definition you want. In fact that exact definition is why all of the laws around social media bans and ID restrictions in the southern United States are being overturned. That definition is so vague as to be completely useless.
Forums are not social media.
More like proto-social media, a key defining factor for modern social media is things like feeds and ranking of both comments and posts. Which even PF and Lemmy do, if however basic the algo is
Traditional forums had the community and people could post content, but there was usually no ranking of posts or comments. Mostly just chronological order, with the exception of posts with the most recent replies being at the top of whatever category you were in
Though I'm sure there probably was a few "forward thinking" large forums that did something with feeds that looked more like modern SM
I'd say the defining characteristics is being people vs content based.
Something like FB/Insta/Xitter/Mastodon is person centric, you're looking at and interacting with things based on who posted it, even if it's an algorithmic bot pushing it on you.
Something like Lemmy/Piefed/Reddit you engage with the content and other people based on the content and/or the topic of the board. There are notable people who post and comment a lot, but they're not the draw any more than the comment section of a news site.
FWIW basically every forum I was using 15-25 years ago had a karma system.
The feed didn't really exist as you describe on early social media either
You'd think the main aspect of social media is interacting with other users, as opposed to passively consuming content.
There's lots of interaction on mainstream SM, I partake in a little guilty pleasure with TT and while there isn't as much depth to it as say a Reddit or Threadiverse comment section would be, there's still plenty of pleasant interactions IME
I'm not saying that tiktok etc. isn't social at all, I'm saying that forums are also a social medium. The passively consumed content I'm talking about is stuff like news articles or personal blogs without a comment section.
Oh I see, yeah, that's definitely a big line, but there's room for more nuanced lines as to what we think of as modern SM.
After all, forums are just an evolution of Usenet discussion groups and BBS' and the Threadiverse/Reddit are an evolution of forums. They're all social media in one form or another, but few would consider it to be modern SM.
So if I sort lemmy comments by new and hide the vote count, it ceases being social media?
I don't think that's where I'd put the dividing line.
Forums are definitely social media. They just predate the term's widespread use.