Yes, forum was and is a good term because it also conveys the roots of democracy in ancient times (a physical place where people met to discuss things of common interest). That was precisely the point a few decades ago: to distinguish between interactive communication media and mass media, which were characterized by one-way communication from a central sender to many recipients.

Unfortunately, however, forum is now a term that sounds outdated because it is associated with the internet before Facebook (2004) – and I would classify Facebook today as a mass medium rather than a social medium, even though, unlike classical publishing media (newspapers and so on), it does not produce any content itself.

The people who argue that forums aren’t social media are people who want to be better than everyone else

I mean everything that falls under the term social media as of now, which includes Lemmy as well as reddit.

And this is precisely the problem I see: The internet is a medium that implies mutual exchange - it is a social medium - this was already the case before the advent of so-called social media in the mid 2000s, a term that was coined to distinguish between classical mass media and “user generated content”, meaning posts and comments by people who are not directly involved with the “Host” of the content.

Now, however, we have the problem that the term, at least in the broad sense, describes services that, in my opinion, do not stand for free exchange between equals, but instead function more like traditional mass media, such as television stations or magazines and newspapers - they are centrally controlled and do not allow open discourse just as publishing media of old did.

The Fediverse is structured differently -more like the old internet, but for applications that people would call social media today. I don’t think the difference can be made clear by insisting that Fediverse apps are in fact much more in line with social media than what the term really describes for most people (meta, tiktok, LinkedIn and the like).

So I think the term is burned and we need a new one that is understandable to the general public and clearly distinguishes the Fediverse from todays’s so-called social media.

The thing is, however, that it will be difficult to find a term that describes social media without using this very term, which is likely to cause confusion with services that today are actually more akin to traditional mass media, which did have letters to the editor but were not in the least “social” in a sense of exchange between equals.