A Gartner survey found that 53 per cent of consumers believe the current state of social media has decayed compared to either the prior year or five years ago.
Over 50 per cent of users may shun social media by 2025 as misinformation, toxicity grow::A Gartner survey found that 53 per cent of consumers believe the current state of social media has decayed compared to either the prior year or five years ago.
For what it's worth, I agree with you about Lemmy (and Reddit) not really qualifying as "social media." I think of it more as a spectrum than a binary value...
Old school forums were very specific to a single topic (though most forums I used did have an "Off Topic" board), and only lightly social -- I never knew any forum user outside of their respective forum, and certainly not in real life.
On the opposite end, Facebook/Insta/TikTok are very social -- there's a lot of expectation that you'll be interacting with people that you know personally -- and they are more "agnostic" (?) of any one particular topic.
Reddit and Lemmy land somewhere in between those two extremes, in terms of both the social and topical aspects. But neither cross the line into "social media," at least not for me and my personal definition of the term.
And just to split hairs even a little more, I think Lemmy is more palatable* than Reddit for me, by virtue of the smaller (and generally more tech-savvy) user base.
I just wanted to mention that I got a chuckle out of the word “pallettable” because it’s not quite right but I totally see how you got there. I thought you might like to know that the word is “palatable.”
A palette is the board that a painter uses to hold paint, a pallet is something you pick up with a forklift and a palate is the roof of your mouth/your tasting skill. So something that’s pallettable sounds like something tasty that you’d smear all over a giant board and forklift onto a truck.
Fucking English, lol
You kids, ha. I'm hitting 40 soon, and Lemmy is absolutely as much social media as Reddit is, just different scale and technological underpinning. Don't be high and mighty about it, you can easily burn as much time scrolling through Lemmy communities.
They are social, a busy bar bathroom? You'll make a friend for life in there. There's little media though. Unless they have TVs inside the bathroom/stalls, and I wouldn't really count music since the focus isn't the music but doing your business.
That's like saying Twitter isn't social media because its a microblog. Lemmy is definitely social media. We have profiles, can add each other as friends, send private messages, etc. It's not structured the same as most other social media websites, but it is social media
No matter how much you rationalise it, forum is still a social media. You are still socialising after all-- in a medium of communication. You can still post pictures in forums if you want, but modern social platforms just have better UI and convenience to post videos and photos than older forums.
You know, when I first started to become active on Internet communities as a preteen in the early-to-mid-2000s, I don't think anyone really used the term "social media" to describe them. The term may have existed already, but I didn't think of myself as a user of "social media" at all at the time.
At the time we had web forums run on software like phpBB. Later I discovered wikis and blogs. I have no idea when people started to insist on using the strange term "social media" which may or may not include all those things. Is Reddit/Lemmy "social media"? It certainly differs from most other "social media" in significant ways: we mostly don't use our real names, we don't have followers, we mainly communicate with random strangers rather than the people we know IRL. This is a lot more similar to traditional web forums than to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X/Mastodon, etc.
It is still very similar. Reddit and Lemmy are now primarily fluff content. I've had to block dozens of fluff subs on Lemmy. And misinformation and toxic/unintelligent users are a problem here too.