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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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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
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
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.
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.
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.