Online Friends Are Real Friends
toska.bearblog.dev121 points by Tomte 6 days ago
121 points by Tomte 6 days ago
I met my wife playing Star Wars Galaxies, online. She was member #4 in the guild I ran, The Trade Federation on Flurry, one of a whole crew of people I'd never met in my life. It was a very interesting way to meet, to get to know a person with zero real physical input, no pics (we're too old for that stuff), and we talked on and on about philosophy, life, kids, learning, loving, challenges. For a good while it was just the words, no idea what the other looked like or how old, none of the things you'd normally sort people on before you decide they're worth your time.
The reality is, with no face and no resume in the way, all you've got is the actual person, what they laugh at and how they handle an idea they don't agree with. And in an MMO you see even more, how they solve problems, do quests, handle loot, and deal with moving through the game. That turned out to be the part that actually matters, and it's usually the last thing you learn about someone you met in person, not the first.
At some point we made the leap; she was in Tennessee and I was in California, so meeting in person was a very big deal. I flew out and drove deep into Tennessee, and we met for the first time in a Food City parking lot. It was amazing, we talked for hours.
As they say, "and the rest is history." We married and have been together for 20 years. Meeting her, and a whole crew of people I never met in person but still call friends, is the primary reason I joined the team trying to keep SWG alive [1]. We both still have fond memories of our time together in game, and now in real life.
So when someone tells me online friends aren't real friends, I just smile, because I married mine. And yes, I'm married to a gamer chick, and it's amazing! And all these years later, she's still my friend too. :)
I met so many awesome people in SWG. It did a really great job of fostering social interactions in a real way, not just transactional menu button presses. To get a lot of things done in the economy and the different aspects of the community you had to talk to people. You were also part of a persistent universe, so you could frequent the same spots and end up bumping into people.
Just those two aspects I believe are where online games have gone so wrong, and it's an easy fix. Persistent servers instead of matchmaking, and don't make every little interaction a gamified polished system. Leave some room for the chatbox/voice comms to be relevant for getting stuff done.
It feels like this kind of gameplay has come and gone and new games lack that depth
My son made online friends when he was 14, playing games together with them on Steam. When he is playing a game with them, I often hear him roar with laughter, but they can also be quite serious and talk about life and school. Last month, we took him to Wrocław to meet them, and it was marvelous. My wife and I got to know the parents of these boys (16-17 yo now), had dinner together, and we separated as friends. My son had a blast that week finally meeting them in person.
I've been in a similar position 10 years ago when I was 16. I wanted to meet a bunch of friends from Arma 3, in Wrocław as well.
My parents didn't allow me to go. Years later I still hate them for it. I make sure they never know when I leave town now, since I'm not really in the mood to listen to my mom enumerating every way something bad can happen to me.
Let your fucking kid go. Especially when the kid isn't as retarded as you.
Had plenty of online friends come and go. What I found is that it usually took online relationships longer to get to know each other in some ways, and quicker in other ways.
It was no fun realizing after a few IRL visits that we really just didn't like each other unless careful email communications was our primary means of interaction.
With some folks the time it takes to write an email is all the filter is needed. Sometimes, though, it only takes 5 minutes IRL to realize that you only like the persons email - not the person, themselves.
All online relationships are only for the good times. You really need a friend in bad times, and then you'll find out who is really a friend.
Here's the problem with online relationships, you can pick them up and drop them whenever you like. You can do that in real life to a degree, but sometimes you are forced to confront friends in real life when you don't want to. A real friend requires surviving a degree of confrontation.
The OP article talks about people met online who they subsequently met and hung out with in person. To me, this is now an meatspace friendship, so yeah, it's "real".
Pure online relationships where you have never met or seen the other person are in my experience an order of magnitude less "real". As you note, there's no 'skin in the game' and ghosting a relationship is zero effort and likely zero consequences, and when everyone knows this is the case the relationships are equally less consequential.
This is the crucial difference. The online abstraction facilitates behaviors that are destructive to friendship, like ghosting, blocking, or even banning if you have admin powers in their meeting place.
Also, since real life is abstracted online, small issues tend to become dramatic because. It takes courage, and some recklessness, to open yourself to a total stranger that might not even be what they claim to be. For us who saw the initial anonymous wild west of the Web, it's difficult to trust people online. It might be different with younger generations that grew up with having their real identity open in several mainstream places.
I've experience that probably in the same ratio with IRL and Online contacts.
Sometimes people just go into different directions, it's sad but it's ok.
I've kept alive some online friendships from the bb forums, that I've met in real life a couple of times.
Similar to friends from HS, college or ex coworker friendships, sometimes interests change, they get into weird values you don't share or mature at a different speed than you. Sometimes it's just a logistics problem, it's hard to keep friends when you have a family, jobs and live in another time zone.
I've been ghosted by IRL friends as bad as with online friends. Outside of an awkward encounter in the mall or something like that, there is no real difference in that regard.
Maybe in isolation, although in most competitive video game spaces (which is where I've met majority of my "online friends") a disagreement between two parties tend to get resolve because it disrupts the entire dynamic.
It is increasingly difficult to just "drop" someone when you friends with their IRL friends, which is also pretty common. You'll play a game and meet someone, they'll meet you and invite their friend to all queue up.
> Maybe in isolation, although in most competitive video game spaces (which is where I've met majority of my "online friends") a disagreement between two parties tend to get resolve because it disrupts the entire dynamic.
Sure but often the most easiest way to resolve nontrivial disputes online is to remove one of the participants from the community.
> It is increasingly difficult to just "drop" someone when you friends with their IRL friends, which is also pretty common. You'll play a game and meet someone, they'll meet you and invite their friend to all queue up.
Now you're bringing in real life relationships which yes are much harder to just drop.
I agree. Without seeing someone regularly in person or knowing their body language, mannerisms, quirks etc., I find the relationship to be much more disposable. There are people I was friends with in college that I only keep up with over text and those relationships are much more frail than they used to be.
I once read about a father who told his daughter, "real friends are people who care how your life ends up." I think that's a pretty good definition to go by.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. Embracing this change in what you value in relationships is a key part of growing up.
The shift from playing together (childhood) to having each others' backs (adolescence, college, 20s) to building up each others' lives (adulthood).
Your true friends have bigger dreams for you than you have for yourself.
This is really beautiful. It's wisdom that seems so clear at my current stage of life, but wasn't obvious to me at age 15 or even 25.
"Your true friends have bigger dreams for you than you have for yourself."
I like yours even more !
> This will be the sixth time that at least one of us has traveled to hang out with the other.
Are these really online friends if you are also recognizing them as real-life humans that exist in the same world you do and treat them like you would any other friend? Aside from maybe the Amish (and even that's questionable if you pay close enough attention to what they are hiding), there is almost nobody who doesn't communicate with friends using electronic devices. That is not a unique property.
"Online friend" only seems like a useful distinction if you truly think of them as a some kind of nebulous chat entity that comes to you via a connected device, where specific implementation details be it human, AI, space alien, or magical fairy doesn't play into the experience. Where if you eventually found out that it was actually ChatGPT on the other end you wouldn't be disappointed.
The definitions seem kind of arbitrary, online friend seems to mean either:
1. friend who you primarily communicate online
2. friend where initial contact was made online
Option 1 seems odd, especially for friends who have moved. Are they reclassified as "online friend"? Option 2 represents only a single moment in time and seems to have little bearing on everything past that initial contact.
Also some people seem to classify "real friend" as "friend that I physically see on a regular basis".
> Option 2 represents only a single moment in time and seems to have little bearing on everything past that initial contact.
It has bearing indefinitely because it means you likely need to travel in order to interact offline.
Friends who've moved might or might not eventually demote to "online friend" status, in a similar way to how they might or might not demote to "used to be friends" status, I suppose.
A counterpoint is that people - especially young people - who spend enough time on the internet to be willing to develop online friendships tend to be people who lack a proper irl social life, and (from my own personal experience) it is painfully obvious when you meet someone in real life who has grown up socialising primarily with people on Twitter and in Discord servers vs people who've had a more healthy balance.
Despite my best efforts to make it work, it's quite easy for me to see the contrast between people I've met from the internet and people who originated irl. The terminally-online people tend to have much higher rates of mental illness or be uncomfortably weird to be around. On the bright side, I've found this to be less true when socialising with people who I've met through those internet friends.
Additionally, internet friendships are more viable the less interesting and wholesome your life actually is. You can't start a band together. You can't share opinions on the taste of a meal unless it's from a multinational fast food chain. You can't walk through a forest together. You can't go on a bicycle ride on the trail near your house and share an equal level of genuine appreciation for how beautiful the nature looks this time of year, with full sensory experience. (Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH3D1cpm6do)
Sure, the internet could be a good tool to initially find people (if you're lucky enough to not experience the issues described my first two paragraphs), but for me the aim should be to transition to an in-person relationship as quickly as possible. I don't want my friendships to just be text on a screen, where every thought I express to them is monitored by the digital surveillance panopticon, where they could disappear and be replaced with ChatGPT and I wouldn't know the difference, where my friendship with them is on-hold if their house loses internet for a week and their cell phone reception isn't good enough to make video calls, where I can't give them a hug or offer to tidy their house with them or make any tangible, physical positive impact on their life.
Hard disagree. Online friends are easy to ditch. Real life friends are around wether you like it or not. That fact alone has huge repercussions.
Real-life friends are ditching each other commonly these days, because the Block function on Whatsapp (or whatever app they use to communicate) seems so convenient and consequence-free.
Maybe I'm old school, but if you can erase someone from your life because you block them on an app, this probably was not 'real-life'?
In 2026, the way that friends who don't see each other at work/school arrange to meet and maintain that friendship, is via WhatsApp or the local equivalent.
The only situations you can't stop seeing someone you don't like IRL are:
1) School 2) Work 3) Very small town
If you live in a major metro area, it's pretty easy to not see people, especially if you're actively wanting to avoid them.
4. Having kids together.
5. Having mutual friends.
6. Having common interests (playing in sports leagues, charity/volunteer work, active in local politics)
Exactly and many friendships are formed from sharing common spaces in the first place. Both online and offline - with the difference being that the online spaces have a one-click ban/block function while for offline spaces that's not as easy.
How is that really any different than screening their phone calls or ignoring them if they come to the door?
There are very few people that are schizoid enough to intentionally ignore a friend who comes to their door.
There are very few people that are schizoid enough to ignore someone saying "hey we're not friends anymore, don't contact me again" and then show up at their house
There are very few people what are schizoid enough to think that telling that to someone's face is remotely the same level as using an online block function. The latter has a much much lower barrier.
My experience is real-life friends are more fleeting because you met them through geographic circumstances like school or work that change. Whereas your online friends are there no matter where life takes you.
Exactly. Perhaps OP was just lucky to never encounter any hardships that tested his online friendships before they moved to real life.
Does this come from experience or?
My best friends are friends I made due to my software hobby when I was a child. Hard to find such group concentrated in my proximity at the time.
I still continue to talk and meet with them every once in a while even though we are continents apart.
If someone you call a "friend" ditches you just like that. I think maybe you're too quick to call people friends.
Yes, online people can disappear, but I have online friends whom I've been talking to for the past 12 years (basically all the way back to when i returned to the social internet).
It's really all about trust and time, like any other friendship.
For online friendship to really work, we need to solve the problem of pig-butchering scammers (scammers who "make friends with you" and eventually get you to give them money somehow, e.g. by depositing money in a "crypto trading platform", sending money for a "health crisis", etc.)
This problem will only get worse with conversational AI agents/deepfakes/etc. For every human seeking genuine friendship there might be 100 AI agent scammers.
Same thing happens IRL too. Not just literal scams but all kinds of ways people take advantage of one another.
Still doesn't change the arithmetic.
Something like half of Cambodia's GDP comes from scams. The internet is key to enabling this.
Use apps like Snapchat to ensure they are who they say they are (if they refuse to verify via snap or insta's snap feature don't bother with them). If they are not local delete them immediately if they ever ask for money or give a sob story, no matter how long you've been chatting! Protect yourself and don't be a fool as the Internet can be amazing on one side (have many chat buds on Snap and other apps who have verified themselves too and never asked for money) and horrible on the other side(i dont give any others a chance).
>delete them immediately if they ever ask for money or give a sob story, no matter how long you've been chatting!
So your internet friends will delete you immediately in your moment of need? How reassuring.
Yup i will delete them as soon as they ask for money! I don't have friends who are needy in real life past Many years. Those in real life friends who have been needy knew not to ask me too much cause they knew I'd be judgey for their stupid decisions.
What do you mean snap feature? Can you explain?
I assume he means sending images, in real time taken from the built-in snapchat camera.
You cannot "snap" someone without actually snapping a picture. You cannot for example generate some AI image or photoshop something and send it, as it will appear as an attachment, instead of a snap.
Snapchat is app where you send live photos directly from your phone's camera. When you snap someone its a non-filtered picture you just took from your phone's camera (its how you look at that present moment) that you send to your contact and they will snap you back or vice versa. Great way to ensure neither are catfishing or are a scammer as scammer always use fake or AI pics.
I think a more salient point is made here:
> "In addition, there's generally a lower chance that the friendship develops out of convenience alone. Don't get me wrong, many in-person friendships are born this way and can turn into the most meaningful lifelong connections."
I don't have any "online friends" at the moment, but if I did, I'd have met them in the online equivalent of my city, but not at work and not next door, not in highschool. On the extreme end of convenience, you have precarious, proximity-oriented, passive, almost lazy social activity; you meet the friends at work, and you might invite them to drive out to your bbq in the burbs where you've also invited the people next door and across the lane. On the extreme other end you have friends that occur despite every communication and proximity challenge being thrown in your way. Great friends come from mutual investment despite some level of inconvenience you both can tolerate, and it's my opinion that if the seeds of the friendship are planted only in the shallow soil of easy access, then the plant won't bear much fruit, and may be ripped out of the ground as soon a layoff rolls around.
I don't online friends as meaningfully distinct from the requirements of any other robust type of friendship. They're just formed in the ephemeral online equivalent of a cosmopolitan city. I have strong friendships in different pockets pf the city for different reasons in different circles, and don't think they'd all work well together in the same room. Some I climb mountains with, some I watch movies with, some I play video games with.
Online acquaintances meanwhile, are formed in one discrete silo of interaction and don't stretch beyond it, much like your nextdoor neighbor or coworker.
Is this reddit or hn?
With my online friends there's a shared understanding that we'll most likely never meet IRL and probably wouldn't even like each other. It's like mutual parasociality, lol.
I work fulltime and have 2 kids still at home by myself. I made my two best friends on MMORPGs, one on FFXIV almost 10 years ago now, and one in Black Desert just talking about black metal bands we both liked in server chat.
I have acquaintances IRL, mostly from work. But my actual friends are people who I've never met face-to-face.
They used to be real friends. At this point, if you only know someone online, they might not even be a someone let alone a friend.
I'm sorry, but this is like saying "online sex is real sex". I'm sure some people can get the same stimulation, but it very much isn't the same.
Humans need other humans, in flesh and blood in front of them. Bonding needs a physical presence. That's the only way our social processes have evolved.
Given the sociability crisis and how having online friends can still have benefits, it's fine to paint them as something good, but they shouldn't be mistaken for the real thing, and this sort of ideas hide away our unnatural modern lifestyle.
I've had flesh and blood humans in front of me and it didn't feel good, maybe you're projecting.
Maybe I'm projecting a preference for something that humans have always done. But are you sure you're not trying to normalize your own unnatural preference?
How do you make online friends? I’ve been on Reddit for many years and have rarely even DM’ed anyone. I’ve also tried apps like Boo but the conversations always fizzle out.
Now a days I'd say discord is the best.
I've been running my server for about 6 years already, and it's a pretty strong community of around 20 or so people. Sometimes we get new people, not everyone is a perfect fit and they might stay for a few weeks before leaving. Some have left after a few years, some leave and come back; others come every so many months to chat for a day or two before going away.
There's many different types of relationships that can be formed in places like that.
I think what's most important is that there needs to be something you all share for it to work. Maybe it's anime, sports, whatever (in my particular case, it's an LGBT server).
I've already met around 5-6 people from this server IRL, and so far it's always been a great time.
Mostly on technologies that enables people talking. My first online friends, were from using IRC; I even made local friends, I would never without using the online way. Then I made friends using simple emails to far away people. Next I remember I did a lot of friends using SecondLife, were i found out about "mein sonnenshein", a virtual friend i virtually married 4 times and divorce four times also (it was very cheap like 10 cents to marry and 25 to divorce, lol) and a lot of other good friends; last one i got it in a MMORPG where i saw a "beautiful" elf warrior and started talking to her, and it results she spoke the same language and were in another continent. There is been a lot of time over, but i still make contact with some of them. I would dare to say that the virtual friends were as good as the real ones, because in the end we are all humans and connected with language, and resonate in many ways.
Reddit hasn't really facilitated friendships (let alone the kind leading to real-life meetups) since the 2018 redesign at least; even before that the site was remarkably impersonal compared to any old-school forum.
Back in the good 'old' days, by playing repeatedly on the same server. On many games I've played (JK, UT, COD1-4), the servers just turned into giant chat rooms after 9pm or so. You play some games, chat a bit, then hang out on TeamSpeak.
I have no idea how people do it nowadays, gaming seems to have lost that social touch (at least to me).
You have to join a more restrict community such as the FIFA PRO Clubs or the Rainbow Six teams or whatever is restrict and gaming thing . The general chatter/board where a plethora of people hangout such as reddit won't get you anywhere just like real life
Shared interests on small chat platforms. Discords for a niche subject replaced the old IRC channels. Twitch chats for small-medium streamers also work similarly (which was based on IRC!)
I find that niche Discords are so much harder to find and join than niche IRC channels used to be
Discord's not a bad way if there's a shared interest. I met some great people on a server dedicated to a hockey team. We'd all watch the game and blather away in chat. You get to know them after a while.
For me, it was a Twitch chat community. It started with everyone showing up the same time every week to watch a couple of people who streamed together. They eventually started a Discord server when Discord became available (which decreased the closeness of the actual Twitch chat community in some ways by making it all more asynchronous, imo, but did also solidify the community beyond Twitch in other ways). I've been to several meetups where I met many of those people, and have also separately met the two streamers a couple of times as well. I consider a number of them "online friends" to a varying degree.
I think something like Reddit would be unlikely to lead to this sort of thing, unless you're regularly participating in a small enough subreddit in a consistent/repetitive manner so as to recognize and be recognized by others (for example, I once helped run a little fanfic book club in a show's subreddit, and if that had gone on for longer, then I could see myself having gotten to know the other co-organizers a little better).
The key is probably to have some shared interest to bring you to the same place, but also an environment that's flexible enough to sometimes talk about things outside of the main interest. Older forums that would have an off-topic board were probably better about this than Reddit, since Reddit tends to segregate discussion about different topics into different places (with different people).
Instagram, actually. People try to do introduction posts in their niches (and everybody has niches) and I’ve made durable online friendships with them.
for me, the non-committal nature of online friends is nice.
the best online friends are the people I've known for 15 years, whom I just message two/three times a year for a deep conversation.
IRL friends have too much IRL mess of scheduling, meeting up, solving the issue that friend A really dislikes friend B now yet you need to fit them at one party.
There are a couple people I've met on HN, then emailed with, then met IRL.
There are also some people I've known IRL, who then saw my stuff on HN and reconnected with me IRL.
The former is neat, but the latter is even better.
During covid I made a lot more friends and happened to interact people with all different backgrounds, and ngl this helped me alot in many ways
I have 3 long term online friends which I've kept in touch with for over a decade but I never met them offline (only 2 I met over video chat).
anybody got into the online to IRL issue where you pictured the person differently and it didn't survive the meeting ?
Meeting an online friend IRL without ever having seen a photo of them is odd.
I'd say that sending your photo to a someone online is even weirder. If you're friends based on hobbies, interests, then their appearance (assuming decent hygiene ofc) shouldn't matter that much. From numerous times I've met online friends, I might've seen their photo few times at most?
photos don't help much, actually it would be more about not hearing them before, but i guess my age is showing, in the 2020s everybody has voice chats regularly i guess. but before i was uncomfortable hearing and seeing the body language of someone. it's quite immature but it's something that happens. and beyond that, a relationship online may not be the same as in person.. when everyone has its own space and can come and go at any time, it's free-er
Rehab friends are real friends, but a person shouldn't ever want to experience the circumstances necessary to have rehab friends.
Online friends are as real as sending racy photos then getting extorted for Google Play cards.