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Or another term which is more descriptive. This is the first thing people see when they type in Lemmy
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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The term link aggregator makes me think of a search engine. A forum is based on user content. Forums generally make lots of new threads too. The only way forum threads stay active is when people bump them by responding to it. Lemmy posts also stay on the front page longer if people keep responding to them.
Lemmy posts are still designed to decay and fall off the front page. The posts last longer if they have participation but the only way to make something last a long time is to sticky the post so it doesn't decay.
Forums aren't like that. Forum threads are meant to stay around as long as people bump them and they can be ancient, with hundreds of pages of comments, and the thread still keeps getting bumped because new content is added to the thread.
Also, the way comments are organized is different. Our comments are threaded so we can have a conversation between us in a comment chain, but forum comments are sequential. The comments section of every thread would look way different if it was a forum.
Forums are just structurally different. If you don't like "link aggregator" that's understandable, it's actually not very descriptive, but you still need to be able to differentiate between forums and whatever-the-heck this space is.
I think this is kind of arbitrarily defining a forum even though I would absolutely, personally, consider this to be a form of forum as well
Let's just call everything a website. It's all on the internet, right?
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The important point is that people who are not familiar with what Lemmy is can understand it feom reading its description. Other suggestions are possible too.
Digg and Reddit invented the terminology and I don't think people are unfamiliar with it.
I vaguely remember the term from yCombinator which is exclusively links and does not have communities.
Even when using Reddit for many years in the past I never heard the term. It seems like Reddit too realized that it was not a good term for marketing.
According to NATOpedia Reddit is also a forum and "social news aggregation platform
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit