“The SCOPE Act takes effect this Sunday, Sept. 1, and will require everyone to verify their age for social media.”
So how does this work with Lemmy? Is anyone in Texas just banned, is there some sort of third party ID service lined up…for every instance, lol.
But seriously, how does Lemmy (or the fediverse as a whole) comply? Is there some way it just doesn’t need to?
I totally disagree on both counts: forums are social media, and Lemmy is not a mere forum. Lemmy is a platform where people can create forums, and many of those forums (communities) exist mainly to socialize.
I’ll give you that some forums (both on Lemmy and otherwise) that have a clear defined topic - such as tech support for a particular thing - are somewhat different from “social media”, but even in those three are often regulars who use the forum to socialize with each other. Any forum with an “off-topic” subforum is social media in my book, in a very real sense (not just technically).
But hey, we can disagree on this and it’s fine.
To clarify why I think Lemmy is not a forum: in my eyes, forums are set up by the admins, only the admins can decide which subforums exist and what’s allowed in them. Lemmy and reddit are not simple forums because they allow any user to create a subforum and make those choices and decisions, that traditionally are reserved for admins. It’s an extremely important difference and makes Lemmy much more of a general social platform and not a focused forum.
Lemmy has the ability to lock down forum creation, like on programming.dev which is the 8th largest lemmy site.
Social media has always been defined as being about people, not topics. People just don’t even try to use the right words though so you get ridiculous things like people calling something coincidental or unfortunate “ironic”.
By your definition every single news comment section is social media, which is clearly a ridiculous suggestion. Webchat, irc, literally anywhere there’s a comment section. That’s just clearly incorrect and so broad as to be a completely useless definition.
Engaging with people does not make it a social media platform.
A bathroom wall covered in graffiti messages is not social media.
an email is not social media.
text messages are not social media.
a brick with “Fuck You” written on it, thrown through a window, is not social media.
A restaurant you go to with friends is not social media.
A webforum is not social media.
IMs are not social media.
Just because you socialize on/in/at something, does not magically make it social media… Because Social Media is a very specific type of thing.
Stop trying to make everything into freaking facebook.
facebook is social media, therefor friendica is social media
instagram is social media, therefor pixelfed is social media
twitter is social media, therefor mastodon is social media
at the VERY least, all the latter platforms can interact with each other via activity pub, as can lemmy. by interacting with lemmy, you’re making interactions with social media
social media isn’t just big tech - social media is a way of interacting with a system
is reddit social media? most people would say yes it definitely is… and this makes lemmy firmly social media
