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.