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Making friends on the internet

jon.bo

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Re: Making friends on the internet

#21

Post by jborichevskiy »

schlagetown wrote: post #11

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…

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!

Re: Making friends on the internet

#22

Post by nanomonkey »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #9
historia_novae wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

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.

Re: Making friends on the internet

#23

Post by nanomonkey »

jarenmf wrote: post #17

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.

I would suggest some of the decentralized (non-corporate owned) social platforms like Matrix, Scuttlebutt, Mastodon, Gemini, Hypercore (DAT/Beaker Browser).

Re: Making friends on the internet

#25

Post by jborichevskiy »

thdc wrote: post #15

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 o…

> 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.

Re: Making friends on the internet

#27

Post by smoldesu »

evocatus wrote: post #2

> 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.

Back in my day, we'd harass the people we admired on Freenode until they gave us their email address!

Re: Making friends on the internet

#28

Post by EZ-Cheeze »

jborichevskiy wrote: post #26
EZ-Cheeze wrote: post #24

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

Love your website!!

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

Re: Making friends on the internet

#29

Post by Teknoman117 »

celdon25 wrote: post #18
avgDev wrote: post #14

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…

> 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.

The only ones I've really been fond of are groups where the members are also mostly in-person friends as well. So everyone knows what the others are truly like.

To be honest, maybe it's a terrible idea, but I do try to bring my "real self" to the internet and not some crafted personality. I never put up anything I wouldn't tell someone in person. I don't act different than I do in person.

Re: Making friends on the internet

#30

Post by smoldesu »

nanomonkey wrote: post #23
jarenmf wrote: post #17

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.

I would suggest some of the decentralized (non-corporate owned) social platforms like Matrix, Scuttlebutt, Mastodon, Gemini, Hypercore (DAT/Beaker Browser).

+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.
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