I think the focus is digital media, and in that space media is the short of multimedia.

Media is more audio, video, image. Which fits social media.

Most forums and blogs are text-based or primary text. There is no blog sharing only images/videos/audio as posts. Also no such forum.

That would be my key differentiation - forums and IRC is social, but not really media.

You are right. According to the definition of social media, Lemmy is social media. However, “social media” would by definition fit any kind of digital communication media. A forum, or a blog, or an IRC channel are also, by definition, social media.

I would argue that the social media has a distinct association with Facebook, Instagram and the diverse spawns of those, and by association doesn’t fit anything else. At best, we simply lack a different term, which splits “old-school” stuff like forums and blogs. I view lemmy more like a forum. You have categories, and users can go into categories to start discussions. You don’t follow anyone. People also don’t create and post their own content, but rather seek discussions or share other stuff from the internet. Your goal is not reach, follow count or like count.

It is social media, but it’s definitely nothing like Facebook. We simply lack a better term.

It would be great if people stop using social media in general.

If you have browser with search suggestions enabled, everything you type in URL bar gets sent to a search engine like Google to give you URL suggestions. I would not be surprised if Google uses this data to check what it knows about the domain you entered, and if it sees that it doesn’t know anything, it sends the bot to scan it to get more information.

But in general, you can’t access a domain without using a browser which might send that what you type to some company’s backend and voila, you leaked your data.

It’s not bitching if it’s true. Nextcloud has really poor performance alone, it tries to do to many things at once and none of it ends up being good. It was amazing for it’s time and it’s idea but it simply doesn’t scale, not technically, not with time. They need to redo the architecture and probably move to something better performing than PHP. I never heard anyone in any environment even considering PHP as an option in 2025.

Same way you protect anything else valuable in your house - by locking the door and potentially installing (selfhosting) security cameras. I’d completely disagree that a server will be a target for a common thief. What are they gonna do with that? Who is gonna buy that from them? What can they buy with that? It’s useless garbage for them.