Yeah, please. Why be deceptive? It serves no one.

Better yet, take responsibility for your own pleasure. Play an active role in getting what you want out of the act. Communicate. Why wouldn’t you?

For what it’s worth, I agree with you about Lemmy (and Reddit) not really qualifying as “social media.” I think of it more as a spectrum than a binary value…

• Old school forums were very specific to a single topic (though most forums I used did have an “Off Topic” board), and only lightly social – I never knew any forum user outside of their respective forum, and certainly not in real life.
• On the opposite end, Facebook/Insta/TikTok are very social – there’s a lot of expectation that you’ll be interacting with people that you know personally – and they are more “agnostic” (?) of any one particular topic.
• Reddit and Lemmy land somewhere in between those two extremes, in terms of both the social and topical aspects. But neither cross the line into “social media,” at least not for me and my personal definition of the term.

And just to split hairs even a little more, I think Lemmy is more palatable* than Reddit for me, by virtue of the smaller (and generally more tech-savvy) user base.

E: Spelling (thank you, WelcomeBear!)

Abraham Lincoln said something very similar (though the exact nature of the threat he was talking about is the subject of some debates). Those familiar with “Great Moments with Mister Lincoln,” the predecessor to Disney’s Hall of Presidents, will recognize it. Regardless, it has always stood out to me as very profound and your post reminded me of it:

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

These last few years have continuously provoked the memory of this quote for me as well.

Of course he doesn’t smell, his mask completely covers up his nose.