It didn’t used to be. At least for me and i don’t recall constantly seeing posts on social media about how lonely and sad everyone was or how to make friends. Now every other magazine article is about how lonely everyone is, nobody gets together, and gen Z doesn’t socialize, drink, or have sex.
Why is there such an epidemic of loneliness and why are people content to be lonely rather than socialize?
Why is so hard to connect? Because people having nothing in common anymore? I used to connect with people over books, movies, hobbies, etc. But now it feels increasingly hard to do that. Most folks I meet don’t care about any of that, they just mostly complain about their lives to you or go on political rants about how unfair the world is.
My friends and my dates no longer seem to watch films, or do much of anything other than spend time on social media? I dont’ use social media so I’m pretty ignorant of it all.
I don’t really consider Lemmy to be social media, nor do I YouTube. I suppose that’s against the norm, but I don’t comment on either too often, and when I do it doesn’t replace conversations with my friends. I also don’t pay attention to people’s usernames (apart from blocking Tankies) or expect to build any relationship. They are just news/current events/video sources.
I don’t deny they have social elements built in, but social media to me was something like Facebook where you had your real name and real friends following you and you posted about yourself anf each others lives. Maybe that’s Social Media and this is Social Media Lite?
User profiles ✅
Voting ✅
Up/downmodding of posts and comments ✅
Logins and persistent identity ✅
What social media elements is Lemmy missing?
All the ones I mentioned? It’s not tied to your real identity or IRL friend/social circles.
In your example sure, Lemmy uses the community to vote things up or down to assist in curation, but I don’t look at WHO voted things up or down (I know the data is technically available). And the logins/profiles are random names to me, I don’t know or have relationships with any of these people, so again they are meaningless. This is why it feels like a platform, but not social media. We used web forums and bullitenboards before the word “social media” was coined and we see big differences between tbe two today.
So while I agree Lemmy has social elements, it’s used completely differently then something like Facebook. YouTube has all those elements as well, but I use it to watch infotainment/explainers etc. I have Nebula as well which has none of the social elements and it feels identical because I don’t use any of them.
I guess the difference is are the social elements intregal to the platform, or tacked on and optional, and what kind of weight do they have.