16 ms·

Making friends on the internet

88 points by jborichevskiy 4y ago

evocatus 4y ago
> it starts with twitter No thanks. If this is the state of socialization in an era where online discourse is controlled by private interests with "agile" ethics, and people are too afraid to socialize in real life for a growing number of reasons, I'll deepen my mastery of hermitage.
- lin83 4y ago
  I'm just as cynical. > I’ve been on the internet since I was 14 (11 years ago). The author is young. They weren't around to remember the early internet or life without it. Their childhood/adolescence is corporate controlled, algorithm driven websites like Youtube and Facebook. Their outlook as an "Internet native" has been shaped by the enforced behaviours of sites like Twitter.
- historia_novae 4y ago
  Yes, probably the saddest thing I read this week. Self-promotion on twatter and HN is different than forming friendship. The goold old days of fora was way better to make friends from the internet IMO. Nowadays everything seems to be a link aggregator which fundamentally change how people interact with each other. Also it may be more an academic thing, but cold emailing is a good way to make contact. Not necessarily friends thought it can happen but at least it can make projects advance, with very little (public) noise.
  - AlwaysRock 4y ago
    > The goold old days Okay. But those days are gone. So what do you expect OP and folks growing up today to do? Shy of time travel they cant live the childhood you did and experience the magical internet of the ~90's. Maybe their version is just as good to them as yours was to you?
    - psyc 4y ago
      Those days are not gone. Forums mated with IRC and became Discord.
      - AlwaysRock 4y ago
        Uh I guess? Wasnt the point thought that companies are shaping the online experience more now than in the past? Discord may be less moderated than most (although the controversies section of their wiki page is longer than any other section) but that seems to be more of a bug than a feature. Eventually the big acquisition or IPO will come and then the moderation will follow.
    - nanomonkey 4y ago
      There are still plenty of decentralized (non-corporate owned) social platforms like Matrix, Scuttlebutt, Mastadon, Gemini to experiment with, set up for your own community or meet people and make friends online.
- r29vzg2 4y ago
  > attend offline events! Be adventerous Meeting in-person is harder but increases the intimacy and richness of communication. Combine an offline meetup with a walk through a park or a museum for maximum serendipity. Clearly you missed this part of post.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Back in my day, we'd harass the people we admired on Freenode until they gave us their email address!
sebmellen 4y ago
Hey Jon! We're friends (followers-of-one-another...?) on Twitter. Super cool to see a post from you here. Small world! I'll take this as an opportunity to 'send that dm / email / offer to connect'. Going to send you a message on Twitter.
lampshades 4y ago
I miss AIM.
kowlo 4y ago
Not sure what it's like now, but over a decade ago I made "online friends" on online games. Those were great times... Legend of Mir 2, Phantasy Star Online, Gunbound, even WoW!
- sleepycatgirl 4y ago
  I am still making friends online, so Imma write my experience too: In MWO, I saw someone with interesting username, that was sole reason to start chat with them, then later got invite to Discord server, And there I met more people, and made like 3 good friends, In World of Warships... It was mostly: Find clan -> Join discord -> Chat -> Potentially find people you vibe well with -> Friends So yeah... a bit of discord focus there.. But still, some friends I made, were over steam, via TF2 or Garry's mod, and considering those are still alive, definitely still possible, Tbh I still have yet to try MMO Twitter... Feels a bit different. I find someone I vibe with, we interact with each other, but usually... it tends to feel, at best, something that has to be yet a friendship, but not reaching friendship itself at all? Hard to tell.
schlagetown 4y ago
Good post, a lot rings true in my experience! Twitter is a uniquely good place to meet people, though it requires a lot of work and calibration to use successfully, and it takes practice to be yourself in a public broadcast medium. But I feel like curating a quality follows list and interacting with people you like online has very high ROI. And it's worth taking the initiative — asking good questions, planning casual events, proposing ideas for collaboration — even if not everything pans out, it's about increasing the surface area for serendipity, opening up more possible paths, planting seeds…
- jborichevskiy 4y ago
  Hey Brendan! > even if not everything pans out, it's about increasing the surface area for serendipity, opening up more possible paths, planting seeds Well said. Like taking daily walks in a neighborhood, getting to know the rhythms of a place and bumping into whoever else might be wandering around. Eventually magic happens!
avgDev 4y ago
The problem with Twitter, and other social media where people use their real name and photo is that in fact people are NEVER going to be themselves. People want to show their best to the world. I don't want to meet 'Yes' friends or 'always positive' friends. Social media is fake. There is no way around it. LinkedIn is fake and disgusting, looking at my feed for a second when I'm responding to recruiters makes me want to vomit. I have known people who were going through divorces, abusive relationships and major life issues, all while their social media feeds were showing how great everything is going. The only 'REAL" people I met online were either focused niche/small subreddits or gaming communities. As you build trust you learn more and more about their real life, good and bad. Growing up I met a girl who was going through chemo treatment and could not leave her home due to all the severe side effects. This was in one of the gaming communities. I really enjoyed her company and it really opened my eyes. Internet was/is an amazing place, I was able to really connect with someone who normally would not open up to strangers. In the end, I didn't really know her IRL, maybe that is why she was able to open up and be direct about sharing her thoughts about suffering, life and death. I have not been able to connect with anyone like this IRL, is it me that doesn't seem trustworthy or approachable?
- celdon25 4y ago
  > The only 'REAL" people I met online were either focused niche/small subreddits or gaming communities. I've found gaming communities (and I've been in many) to be excessively toxic. You can meet good people there, but I've found it's not worth the headache.
  - avgDev 4y ago
    I do agree with your observation. It is generally difficult to find a non-toxic gaming community. This was actually a battlefield group, which brought a lot of older folk. In the 20 years of gaming (jesus, can't believe it has been that long). I have only found a few good communities.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Some are toxic, some are cliquey, some are too established to do anything in. If it isn't a PvP game, odds are you missed the boat if you don't hop on in the first 1-2 weeks of its introduction (or for MMOs / games with long lifespans, a major patch), or you have to really stand out in something (skill, fanart, whatever). I like games, but the ease of getting into a community is nowhere near as low as some people like to sell it as. Especially today. Even if they aren't toxic in the obvious sense, it often feels like a minefield navigating these communities without upsetting someone, getting dogpiled or anything.
thdc 4y ago
In my opinion, the answer has always been to participate in group activities that cover something you're interested in, as it gives an easy starting point to begin a friendship. For me, it is either games or certain coding niches. As a non-user of Twitter, I don't think its organization is conducive to easily finding friends - instead of focused individual communities, I believe it is more free-form (?) as a result of "the algorithm" determining your interests. Which could be considered a plus because of discovery as noted in the article. I do see how you could extrapolate similar interests from other users based on their tweets or replies and bootstrap a friendship from that as the author mentions (kind of risky when dealing with anonymized opinions about controversial topics or just straight up lies), but it seems like much more work compared to participating in a group which you know already shares that interest. To summarize, finding friends on Twitter is kind of like shooting in the dark. However I initially missed the main point of the post because it was stuck towards the bottom after the list. > translat(ing) these (online connections) into offline connections. So now my question is why do you need to make your online connections offline? I have good friendships that are ongoing for years with people that I've only met online and have never felt the need to meet them offline. Note that I don't consider setting up an irl meeting online then meeting them irl as "making friends on the internet" unless I have been regularly interacting for a while already in somewhat private circumstances (like daily casual talk or playing games together).
- jborichevskiy 4y ago
  > So now my question is why do you need to make your online connections offline? I don't believe it a necessity, and there are some online friends I probably won't be able to meet for a while, if ever. But I enjoy moving a conversation offline because no online interface can replicate wandering between parks in Los Angeles and having pizza slices together. Though interfaces can still allow plenty of unique forms of expression -- just vastly different from embodied exploration and reacting to the world together. > To summarize, finding friends on Twitter is kind of like shooting in the dark. Aptly put. Not unlike dating apps or applying to jobs or talking to strangers at bars. It's just one additional avenue for meeting people. You mention the separation between individuals getting algorithmically sorted and interest-based topics. In my experience I find twitter to be both: emergent scenes or corners form by a bunch of independent actors interacting with one another regularly, even though not all are following one another. The edges are fuzzy and overlapping but they have much more "placeness" than an endless feed, even if it is in fact experienced through a feed.
codybrown 4y ago
soulful post. for all the hell/chaos of twitter, it's still the equivalent of OkCupid for meaningful friendships.
- jborichevskiy 4y ago
  <3
jarenmf 4y ago
I made a lot of friends on IRC and internet forums a long time ago. It is much easier when you are anonymous and be truly yourself. I miss these communities nowadays and can't really find a replacement.
- nanomonkey 4y ago
  I would suggest some of the decentralized (non-corporate owned) social platforms like Matrix, Scuttlebutt, Mastodon, Gemini, Hypercore (DAT/Beaker Browser).
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    +1 for Matrix and Mastodon, might wanna check out Libera too. IRC is never coming back in the way we remembered it, but there's still plenty of online communities that are living out their individual Eternal Septembers.
- holler 4y ago
  I just did a Show HN for an anonymous public chat social site in dev https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im
- Markoff 4y ago
  What stops you from being anonymous and truly yourself in small subreddits and Discord channels? I'm frequent visitor of politically incorrect ostracized subreddits (usually following same scenario when the sub grows to big ending being quarantined/banned because it doesn't comply with leftist woke Reddit ideology), I'm anonymous and I can speak my mind usually in majority of people who have no problem with that.
EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
The internet should be making friends for us. Find me everyone who GETS ME. I want a thousand or more
- jborichevskiy 4y ago
  Love your website!!
  - EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
    Welcome to my friend group Today's idea for it: friend group multiplayer with increasing numbers required to form a team - everyone continuously invites +1 Lets all the friend groups smear and grow exponentially
- dt3ft 4y ago
  I’d be okay with just one :)
  - EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
    But think about it - humans will be able to do qualitatively new things with thousands of friends each I was recommended The Affinities while posting about this before and currently have read halfway through. It explores that question quite well so far
zackmorris 4y ago
I wonder how VR will change this. I got into tech as a teenager in the 90s because I was such an introvert and it felt like a way to game the system and maybe meet girls or avoid having to get an actual job. Hah. Waking up every day in this bizarro world of endless overwork just to survive while some other geek wins it all and disappoints humanity has gotten stale. And even with all of this connectedness, people often feel more separated than ever. Like everything I ever wanted came to pass in a corrupted fashion. So far VR is one of the few things that I consider a tentative cure for depression. I think it's because shifting out of this reality is pretty much guaranteed to feel better than staying at this point. So maybe VR will end up being the internet that I thought this one was going to be.
- jrm4 4y ago
  I kind of feel like "roughly as much as MMORPGs slash Pokemon Go slash Fortnite?" I can't see how it would end up too differently from those.
djhworld 4y ago
One thing I really miss about the modern web is forums. I'm in my 30s now but grew up on the web, from 1998 - so not exactly an old timer but enough to ride the wave of web 1.0 -> 2.0. I made loads of friends on forums in those days. Sadly most of those forums died off as time has gone by. One still exists though but there's only a handful of us left, it's extremely rare to get a new member. I know these days everyone uses Discord or Slack or whatever the one is the rust people use (zulip?) but chat isn't the same as forums.
- mjevans 4y ago
  Some of us still use IRC. We wait for the true successor. An open protocol, a secure protocol. That which will subsume even email and provide the answer to all the problems we know.
  - temp-account684 4y ago
    Matrix seems promising in that regard.
- sneak 4y ago
  I run a forum for exactly this reason. Small communities are the way forward. You (or anyone reading this) can find it in my profile.
- Markoff 4y ago
  Well I'm older, I've made friends on forums, Fidonet, IRC etc., but I don't really share the sentiment here, I think it's nostalgia speaking here, you are older so you made friends in past and now it's more difficult and you blame the medium, while younger people nowadays are still making friends. Forums were essentially replaced by Reddit and you can have pretty much same experience as in forum in small subreddit, because what is the difference in the end? You have there threads with replies which can be even quoted, but yeah, media content in comments is heavily discouraged by problematic support in clients. Though I have less time and don't frequent small subreddits and main issue for me would be how anonymous (I don't mean real name, just how recognizable are users from each other) it feels, which is maybe partly because of my Reddit client setup and could be probably resolved by using large avatars at each post/comment, because name and flairs won't stick in the head as much. Discord would be probably decent alternative to IRC nowadays.
rejectfinite 4y ago
Twitter?? I have more luck with Discord servers. Where people actually chat.
jackallis 4y ago
i would like a friend who is comfortable being vulnerable with me and viceversa.Idk how social media provides that.
- em-bee 4y ago
  start by opening up yourself. if you have a family member or close friend pass away, mention that and pick up on the responses. everyone experiences that at some point, and everyone is looking for ways to cope, so you are not sharing some unusual intimate secrets, but it allows to share vulnerability without being invasive.
andrewmcwatters 4y ago
I feel like the structures engineers design in the tech world sort of work against making friends in some ways by emphasizing certain aspects of the software we use away from people. lin83's comment here about enforced behaviors rings true to me. My experience with the regression of social interaction enforced by software is the lack of server browsers in video games. Matchmaking is such crap. Kids don't even really get to experience local multiplayer, but to make things worse, you can't often find servers online and establish making yourself a regular with some people on a dedicated server much anymore.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  At one point in time, MMOs were considered very social, since all interactions had to basically be done in person via chatting. Nowadays you just hop in the dungeon finder, get hucked in with some random people who may not even be from your server but only from your sata center, who you will never see again. The social aspect of games really has diminished.
fold3 4y ago
I've met really incredible people with lastfm personally. It was around 2010 in Berlin and other European cities. Also soulseek to some extent but we've never met irl. On the other hand, I've never met or had any meaningful talk with people from dating apps/website. It just doesn't feel like it's made for people like me.

88 points by jborichevskiy 4y ago

> it starts with twitter No thanks. If this is the state of socialization in an era where online discourse is controlled by private interests with "agile" ethics, and people are too afraid to socialize in real life for a growing number of reasons, I'll deepen my mastery of hermitage.

lin83 4y ago
I'm just as cynical. > I’ve been on the internet since I was 14 (11 years ago). The author is young. They weren't around to remember the early internet or life without it. Their childhood/adolescence is corporate controlled, algorithm driven websites like Youtube and Facebook. Their outlook as an "Internet native" has been shaped by the enforced behaviours of sites like Twitter.
historia_novae 4y ago
Yes, probably the saddest thing I read this week. Self-promotion on twatter and HN is different than forming friendship. The goold old days of fora was way better to make friends from the internet IMO. Nowadays everything seems to be a link aggregator which fundamentally change how people interact with each other. Also it may be more an academic thing, but cold emailing is a good way to make contact. Not necessarily friends thought it can happen but at least it can make projects advance, with very little (public) noise.
- AlwaysRock 4y ago
  > The goold old days Okay. But those days are gone. So what do you expect OP and folks growing up today to do? Shy of time travel they cant live the childhood you did and experience the magical internet of the ~90's. Maybe their version is just as good to them as yours was to you?
  - psyc 4y ago
    Those days are not gone. Forums mated with IRC and became Discord.
    - AlwaysRock 4y ago
      Uh I guess? Wasnt the point thought that companies are shaping the online experience more now than in the past? Discord may be less moderated than most (although the controversies section of their wiki page is longer than any other section) but that seems to be more of a bug than a feature. Eventually the big acquisition or IPO will come and then the moderation will follow.
  - nanomonkey 4y ago
    There are still plenty of decentralized (non-corporate owned) social platforms like Matrix, Scuttlebutt, Mastadon, Gemini to experiment with, set up for your own community or meet people and make friends online.
r29vzg2 4y ago
> attend offline events! Be adventerous Meeting in-person is harder but increases the intimacy and richness of communication. Combine an offline meetup with a walk through a park or a museum for maximum serendipity. Clearly you missed this part of post.
smoldesu 4y ago
Back in my day, we'd harass the people we admired on Freenode until they gave us their email address!

sebmellen 4y ago

Hey Jon! We're friends (followers-of-one-another...?) on Twitter. Super cool to see a post from you here. Small world! I'll take this as an opportunity to 'send that dm / email / offer to connect'. Going to send you a message on Twitter.

lampshades 4y ago

I miss AIM.

kowlo 4y ago

Not sure what it's like now, but over a decade ago I made "online friends" on online games. Those were great times... Legend of Mir 2, Phantasy Star Online, Gunbound, even WoW!

sleepycatgirl 4y ago
I am still making friends online, so Imma write my experience too: In MWO, I saw someone with interesting username, that was sole reason to start chat with them, then later got invite to Discord server, And there I met more people, and made like 3 good friends, In World of Warships... It was mostly: Find clan -> Join discord -> Chat -> Potentially find people you vibe well with -> Friends So yeah... a bit of discord focus there.. But still, some friends I made, were over steam, via TF2 or Garry's mod, and considering those are still alive, definitely still possible, Tbh I still have yet to try MMO Twitter... Feels a bit different. I find someone I vibe with, we interact with each other, but usually... it tends to feel, at best, something that has to be yet a friendship, but not reaching friendship itself at all? Hard to tell.

schlagetown 4y ago

Good post, a lot rings true in my experience! Twitter is a uniquely good place to meet people, though it requires a lot of work and calibration to use successfully, and it takes practice to be yourself in a public broadcast medium. But I feel like curating a quality follows list and interacting with people you like online has very high ROI. And it's worth taking the initiative — asking good questions, planning casual events, proposing ideas for collaboration — even if not everything pans out, it's about increasing the surface area for serendipity, opening up more possible paths, planting seeds…

jborichevskiy 4y ago
Hey Brendan! > even if not everything pans out, it's about increasing the surface area for serendipity, opening up more possible paths, planting seeds Well said. Like taking daily walks in a neighborhood, getting to know the rhythms of a place and bumping into whoever else might be wandering around. Eventually magic happens!

avgDev 4y ago

The problem with Twitter, and other social media where people use their real name and photo is that in fact people are NEVER going to be themselves. People want to show their best to the world. I don't want to meet 'Yes' friends or 'always positive' friends. Social media is fake. There is no way around it. LinkedIn is fake and disgusting, looking at my feed for a second when I'm responding to recruiters makes me want to vomit. I have known people who were going through divorces, abusive relationships and major life issues, all while their social media feeds were showing how great everything is going. The only 'REAL" people I met online were either focused niche/small subreddits or gaming communities. As you build trust you learn more and more about their real life, good and bad. Growing up I met a girl who was going through chemo treatment and could not leave her home due to all the severe side effects. This was in one of the gaming communities. I really enjoyed her company and it really opened my eyes. Internet was/is an amazing place, I was able to really connect with someone who normally would not open up to strangers. In the end, I didn't really know her IRL, maybe that is why she was able to open up and be direct about sharing her thoughts about suffering, life and death. I have not been able to connect with anyone like this IRL, is it me that doesn't seem trustworthy or approachable?

celdon25 4y ago
> The only 'REAL" people I met online were either focused niche/small subreddits or gaming communities. I've found gaming communities (and I've been in many) to be excessively toxic. You can meet good people there, but I've found it's not worth the headache.
- avgDev 4y ago
  I do agree with your observation. It is generally difficult to find a non-toxic gaming community. This was actually a battlefield group, which brought a lot of older folk. In the 20 years of gaming (jesus, can't believe it has been that long). I have only found a few good communities.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Some are toxic, some are cliquey, some are too established to do anything in. If it isn't a PvP game, odds are you missed the boat if you don't hop on in the first 1-2 weeks of its introduction (or for MMOs / games with long lifespans, a major patch), or you have to really stand out in something (skill, fanart, whatever). I like games, but the ease of getting into a community is nowhere near as low as some people like to sell it as. Especially today. Even if they aren't toxic in the obvious sense, it often feels like a minefield navigating these communities without upsetting someone, getting dogpiled or anything.

thdc 4y ago

In my opinion, the answer has always been to participate in group activities that cover something you're interested in, as it gives an easy starting point to begin a friendship. For me, it is either games or certain coding niches. As a non-user of Twitter, I don't think its organization is conducive to easily finding friends - instead of focused individual communities, I believe it is more free-form (?) as a result of "the algorithm" determining your interests. Which could be considered a plus because of discovery as noted in the article. I do see how you could extrapolate similar interests from other users based on their tweets or replies and bootstrap a friendship from that as the author mentions (kind of risky when dealing with anonymized opinions about controversial topics or just straight up lies), but it seems like much more work compared to participating in a group which you know already shares that interest. To summarize, finding friends on Twitter is kind of like shooting in the dark. However I initially missed the main point of the post because it was stuck towards the bottom after the list. > translat(ing) these (online connections) into offline connections. So now my question is why do you need to make your online connections offline? I have good friendships that are ongoing for years with people that I've only met online and have never felt the need to meet them offline. Note that I don't consider setting up an irl meeting online then meeting them irl as "making friends on the internet" unless I have been regularly interacting for a while already in somewhat private circumstances (like daily casual talk or playing games together).

jborichevskiy 4y ago
> So now my question is why do you need to make your online connections offline? I don't believe it a necessity, and there are some online friends I probably won't be able to meet for a while, if ever. But I enjoy moving a conversation offline because no online interface can replicate wandering between parks in Los Angeles and having pizza slices together. Though interfaces can still allow plenty of unique forms of expression -- just vastly different from embodied exploration and reacting to the world together. > To summarize, finding friends on Twitter is kind of like shooting in the dark. Aptly put. Not unlike dating apps or applying to jobs or talking to strangers at bars. It's just one additional avenue for meeting people. You mention the separation between individuals getting algorithmically sorted and interest-based topics. In my experience I find twitter to be both: emergent scenes or corners form by a bunch of independent actors interacting with one another regularly, even though not all are following one another. The edges are fuzzy and overlapping but they have much more "placeness" than an endless feed, even if it is in fact experienced through a feed.

codybrown 4y ago

soulful post. for all the hell/chaos of twitter, it's still the equivalent of OkCupid for meaningful friendships.

jborichevskiy 4y ago
<3

jarenmf 4y ago

I made a lot of friends on IRC and internet forums a long time ago. It is much easier when you are anonymous and be truly yourself. I miss these communities nowadays and can't really find a replacement.

nanomonkey 4y ago
I would suggest some of the decentralized (non-corporate owned) social platforms like Matrix, Scuttlebutt, Mastodon, Gemini, Hypercore (DAT/Beaker Browser).
- smoldesu 4y ago
  +1 for Matrix and Mastodon, might wanna check out Libera too. IRC is never coming back in the way we remembered it, but there's still plenty of online communities that are living out their individual Eternal Septembers.
holler 4y ago
I just did a Show HN for an anonymous public chat social site in dev https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im
Markoff 4y ago
What stops you from being anonymous and truly yourself in small subreddits and Discord channels? I'm frequent visitor of politically incorrect ostracized subreddits (usually following same scenario when the sub grows to big ending being quarantined/banned because it doesn't comply with leftist woke Reddit ideology), I'm anonymous and I can speak my mind usually in majority of people who have no problem with that.

EZ-Cheeze 4y ago

The internet should be making friends for us. Find me everyone who GETS ME. I want a thousand or more

jborichevskiy 4y ago
Love your website!!
- EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
  Welcome to my friend group Today's idea for it: friend group multiplayer with increasing numbers required to form a team - everyone continuously invites +1 Lets all the friend groups smear and grow exponentially
dt3ft 4y ago
I’d be okay with just one :)
- EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
  But think about it - humans will be able to do qualitatively new things with thousands of friends each I was recommended The Affinities while posting about this before and currently have read halfway through. It explores that question quite well so far

zackmorris 4y ago

I wonder how VR will change this. I got into tech as a teenager in the 90s because I was such an introvert and it felt like a way to game the system and maybe meet girls or avoid having to get an actual job. Hah. Waking up every day in this bizarro world of endless overwork just to survive while some other geek wins it all and disappoints humanity has gotten stale. And even with all of this connectedness, people often feel more separated than ever. Like everything I ever wanted came to pass in a corrupted fashion. So far VR is one of the few things that I consider a tentative cure for depression. I think it's because shifting out of this reality is pretty much guaranteed to feel better than staying at this point. So maybe VR will end up being the internet that I thought this one was going to be.

jrm4 4y ago
I kind of feel like "roughly as much as MMORPGs slash Pokemon Go slash Fortnite?" I can't see how it would end up too differently from those.

djhworld 4y ago

One thing I really miss about the modern web is forums. I'm in my 30s now but grew up on the web, from 1998 - so not exactly an old timer but enough to ride the wave of web 1.0 -> 2.0. I made loads of friends on forums in those days. Sadly most of those forums died off as time has gone by. One still exists though but there's only a handful of us left, it's extremely rare to get a new member. I know these days everyone uses Discord or Slack or whatever the one is the rust people use (zulip?) but chat isn't the same as forums.

mjevans 4y ago
Some of us still use IRC. We wait for the true successor. An open protocol, a secure protocol. That which will subsume even email and provide the answer to all the problems we know.
- temp-account684 4y ago
  Matrix seems promising in that regard.
sneak 4y ago
I run a forum for exactly this reason. Small communities are the way forward. You (or anyone reading this) can find it in my profile.
Markoff 4y ago
Well I'm older, I've made friends on forums, Fidonet, IRC etc., but I don't really share the sentiment here, I think it's nostalgia speaking here, you are older so you made friends in past and now it's more difficult and you blame the medium, while younger people nowadays are still making friends. Forums were essentially replaced by Reddit and you can have pretty much same experience as in forum in small subreddit, because what is the difference in the end? You have there threads with replies which can be even quoted, but yeah, media content in comments is heavily discouraged by problematic support in clients. Though I have less time and don't frequent small subreddits and main issue for me would be how anonymous (I don't mean real name, just how recognizable are users from each other) it feels, which is maybe partly because of my Reddit client setup and could be probably resolved by using large avatars at each post/comment, because name and flairs won't stick in the head as much. Discord would be probably decent alternative to IRC nowadays.

rejectfinite 4y ago

Twitter?? I have more luck with Discord servers. Where people actually chat.

jackallis 4y ago

i would like a friend who is comfortable being vulnerable with me and viceversa.Idk how social media provides that.

em-bee 4y ago
start by opening up yourself. if you have a family member or close friend pass away, mention that and pick up on the responses. everyone experiences that at some point, and everyone is looking for ways to cope, so you are not sharing some unusual intimate secrets, but it allows to share vulnerability without being invasive.

andrewmcwatters 4y ago

I feel like the structures engineers design in the tech world sort of work against making friends in some ways by emphasizing certain aspects of the software we use away from people. lin83's comment here about enforced behaviors rings true to me. My experience with the regression of social interaction enforced by software is the lack of server browsers in video games. Matchmaking is such crap. Kids don't even really get to experience local multiplayer, but to make things worse, you can't often find servers online and establish making yourself a regular with some people on a dedicated server much anymore.

bluefirebrand 4y ago
At one point in time, MMOs were considered very social, since all interactions had to basically be done in person via chatting. Nowadays you just hop in the dungeon finder, get hucked in with some random people who may not even be from your server but only from your sata center, who you will never see again. The social aspect of games really has diminished.

fold3 4y ago

I've met really incredible people with lastfm personally. It was around 2010 in Berlin and other European cities. Also soulseek to some extent but we've never met irl. On the other hand, I've never met or had any meaningful talk with people from dating apps/website. It just doesn't feel like it's made for people like me.