Why are people weaving social media and the internet into a single thread? The internet is so vast, social media makes up a tiny sliver of it.
Because to most people outside Lemmy the “internet” (by which they mean the world wide web but that’s me being a pedant) IS social media. There might as well not be anything outside the walled gardens of social media to them because they’ve been conditioned to only stay on one, maybe two platforms for years at this point. The old “what’s a browser?” question these days gets answered with “I don’t need a browser I have Facebook”. Completely nonsensical to us but to them it’s totally natural. Not being derogatory about them or anything but the 60k lemmy users and however many million on Reddit are not the majority. Facebook with it’s 3 billion (with a b) users, IS the majority of the internet.