>But why continue communicating with old friends using, IMHO, a shallow form of building a bond when you can develop new relationships with people where you are

>But why continue communicating with old friends using, IMHO, a shallow form of building a bond when you can develop new relationships with people where you are now and can meet or have fun face-to-face? Because relationships develop and grow over time? Why deploy your server on the Linux kernel, when you could just write your own operating system and deploy on that instead? Why essentially throw away the countless hours you've invested in building a relationship with someone? I imagine you wouldn't apply the same logic to a spouse or children: "sorry honey, I'm moving overseas now, but don't worry, I'll find another wife there." Why do you consider bonding over text shallow? To me if anything it's less shallow, as you have to actually engage with somebody as a person. When hanging out in person, you can bond with anybody over movies, drinks etc. without ever developing a deeper understanding of them, solely by the biological nature of how spending time with people promotes bonding. >This ties into the other comments that point out that we’re starting to favour global, weak ties to people instead of local, strong ties. I’m not a fan of that personally. What don't you like about that? Statistically speaking, you're much more likely to find someone you get along with better along any particular dimension among the billions of people on the globe than the few people who by pure chance happen to be geographically proximal to you. If we assume people seek the most satisfying relationships possible, it's natural for these to be geographically diverse.