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The Britannica entry for the Fediverse is really good
(www.britannica.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2026
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I have a bit of a problem with the term "traditional social media".
The earliest popular form of social media was Usenet. The first one I ever used was web forums (run on phpBB or similar software). Those have a lot more "tradition" than Facebook or Twitter or TikTok, so why are they calling the latter three (deviations from the decentralized "tradition" of the Internet) "traditional social media"?! Is it just that they're the first form of social media that the authors of that article ever used?
Those were not considered social media in their heyday as the term was created after them specifically for sites where a user would maintain a non-anonymous profile, post content about themselves and curating a feed based on other profiles followed.
Forums and Usenet could be considered proto-social-media perhaps given they were clear precursors to it
Of course. I find "social media" a suboptimal term anyway. A good term for the concept is the "participatory Internet".
But if we are going to use it, then it's just media that is produced by society at large as opposed to paid journalists or authors. Meaning Usenet is social media.