You can broadly categorize social networks, or really any communication software, based on four criteria:
- Are replies subordinate to the original post (Facebook, Instagram, blog comments) or top-level posts but linked (Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr, blogs with pingbacks/trackbacks/webmentions)?
- Do you primarily follow people/organizations (all the above) or topics (Reddit, message boards)?
- Is the default interaction one-on-one (email, Skype) or broadcast (most of what we call “social media” these days)?
- Is it a single service (Facebook, Twitter), a collection of isolated services (message boards), or a collection of interacting services (email, the Fediverse, blogs to some extent)?
More than whether the content is likely to be short text, long text, a photo, a video, or a link, these questions define the types of connections and types of interactions that people are going to have.
This is so true. I, unfortunately, am sort of all over the place; mostly though, message boards are for business (I’m all over those over on Spiceworks and Dell, for instance.) and if all my friends were on the fediverse, I’ve jump ship from Twitter and facebook in a second.