Only if you choose the default. Lasting, meaningful friendships can be made - the trick is to ignore the "broadcast" tooling that's heavily suggested to you by

Only if you choose the default. Lasting, meaningful friendships can be made - the trick is to ignore the "broadcast" tooling that's heavily suggested to you by entities that can only exist so long as they have an ever-increasing income - the walls, the feeds, even to some degree the forums - and stay instead in the private messaging systems, the tiny chatrooms, etc. I use IRC as my primary "social media" tool of choice, but some days, I barely look at the channels - my online life is spent in the PMs with the people I've known for years.