Making friends on the internet

I miss having online "friends". Specifically, that type of superficial alley friendship where the social contract is loose and we can laugh, learn from each other or shoot the soykaf without any sort of commitment, big emotional investment, etc. Maybe friend is a strong word. Penpal? It used to be very easy to form relationships like this when I played a lot of multiplayer games in my teen years, but the only online game I play nowadays is smash. Is it possible to find online pals in other ways? every Discord server I've been in makes me feel uneasy for some reason. Conversations sound either excessively immature (making it really obvious that the users are just high school kids at best) or excessively sterile. I just feel out of place. In every single server. I wonder if I'll feel the same if I use matrix. What about IRC? What sort of person still hangs out in those chats? Am I just too old for this now? I'd appreciate any suggestions.

>What about IRC? Most of my best friends are still hanging around with me in IRC channels and we have exactly the sort of comfy relationship you describe. Dunno if there's something special about proprietary spyware rooms, but IRC has always felt more laid back to me in most of the rooms I visit.

>>65914 >Conversations sound either excessively immature (making it really obvious that the users are just high school kids at best) It's possible. I don't really go out of my way to check public discord servers. I've been using discord with close friends, jumping on their servers and meeting people that way. All feels pretty normal and comfy. nothing huge, always kind of a small thight nit community. Only time I went on a public discord server was the Nintendo Homebrew server for questions, and it felt ok, if not crowded. Good folks, didn't stick around there. There was also this Night In the Woods public server i went to related to a project to talk about it, ended up sticking around for a while. Most of em were kids i'm sure but acted pretty fine imo. That was back way before 2020 and I've long left the project, only keeping an eye every once in a while. Don't know how the server is doing nowadays. Just about finding that right server with the right pace, topic interests, right kind of folks. It's a bit RNG involved, it'll take time,but it's worth it, whether it's discord/matrix/XMPP/IRC or whatever. Don't loose hope, OP

>>65914 >What about IRC? What sort of person still hangs out in those chats? Am I just too old for this now? Try it. Download HexChat (or Weechat or Irssi, if you prefer CLI). Xchat is dead. You can get help with your client by using /help command. Connect to Lainchan IRC (see https://www.lainchan.org/irc.html). Most FOSS project have their channels in Libera.chat network (but some use OFTC or other networks). You can join the channel (room) of the FOSS project you are interested but most channels are for tech support. Luckily, many channels either allow (some) offtopic chat or they have a dedicated -offtopic channel. I recommend #lispcafe @ Libera To find channels, use /list command. But you can also use a web search or https://netsplit.de If you want privacy, be sure to use Tor: https://libera.chat/guides/connect If you don't need Tor, you can also request a cloak in some netwokrs (like Libera: https://libera.chat/guides/cloaks). Register your nickname using NickServ (/msg NickServ help ) to make sure no one steals your nick. Most other imageboards have their channels in Rizon network.

>>65917 any cool rooms recommendations?

>It used to be very easy to form relationships like this when I played a lot of multiplayer games in my teen years, but the only online game I play nowadays is smash. Is it possible to find online pals in other ways? 100% possible. My friends and I eventually started doing ops and projects together, but we still shoot the soykaf.

If you want your friendship to evolve into doing 'other' things, then any community, especially around a video game, that involves modding and cracking soykaf will definitely be great. If it's just for talking, Matrix seemed good. It's hard to find good rooms with everyone so spread out- but I think it shares this issue with Discord, actually. IRC can be great, again, if it's a lot of techy anons. Disclaimer: I excessively lean towards technology-related discussion, even for casual discussion, so I might not know what I'm talking about for what you're looking for.

I would only consider internet friends if we were to become offline friends as well.

>>65943 This, any type of obscure modding / "hacking" / cracking discords / IRCs have lots of great people

>>65914 As a millennial I recall exactly the same thing as you describe. The problem is that people of my age have grown up and moved on, so they are not interested in such things anymore and they use the internet only for the "sterile" professional conversations. Meanwhile if you try to befriend any of the GenZ teenagers, you quickly find out that their idea of being funny is to be loud and overuse memes 0 references to some kind of media that you have no idea about, they have a completely different (sub)culture, so that is no go as well. I guess the thing you describe has been lost to time.

>>66160 >memes 0 references memes & references

personally I try to be generally respectful and make acquaintances that way, but I don't really make an effort to "make friends". whether it's on the internet or in real life, people come people go, even your shadow leaves you when you're in the dark. I've combatted my existential dread of loneliness with parasocial relationships in books movies and video games. I find I tend to enjoy them more than my interactions with real people.

>>66160 I think this is one of the reasons people past some age tend to cling to classical music/literature/whatever. They already feel alienated and it seems easier and more logical to join forces with "everyone older than 30" than to try to stick to the ever-changing "forever 18".

>>65914 Look for spaces that are not populated with the "average" person. The internet of today is very different from the one 15+ years ago, back when not every single person was online and people were spread out among many different spaces. The influx of people has produced an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio in the most populated places on the internet (its almost all noise, any form of discussion is drowned out). Even worse, most websites and apps are adtech, gamified, corporate money funnels that are literally designed to produce noise (their term is "engagement"). Think about the stickers on a discord server, all they do is distract from and destroy meaningful conversion by encouraging single emoji responses for everything, boiling down all the conversations to a like/dislike system. So (average people + gamified systems + adtech funnels = extreme levels of noise); expect you will never find any friends in these types of environments. tl;dr, if you want friends, avoid: >popular sites >popular apps >popular hobbies >any system with gamification >>66160 >As a millennial I recall exactly the same thing as you describe. The problem is that people of my age have grown up and moved on, so they are not interested in such things anymore and they use the internet only for the "sterile" professional conversations fuarrrk those people, they were sterile anyways. moved on to what exactly? being a pointless wage slave, consuming netflix all day, and complaining on reddit about some political bullshit they found on their instagram that day? what a great life these people have

>>66186 >moved on to what exactly? Often to raising their kids, settling down and becoming part of a neighborhood, and IRP community.

>>65914 hey come join our IRC group at bph.pw, I've made a lot of friends there.

I feel the same way OP. Public or private chats, it doesn't matter, you still find the same behaviors of terminally online tween spam or people who are afraid to banter in fear of upsetting another so nobody fuarrrking talks. And it either turns into one or the other. I tried Matrix. I like how its really just made for chatting and nothing more, but unless I'm just in the wrong ones the conversations also feel very stale. I think it's due to the self hosted nature of many servers trying to stay on their VPS providers good grace. I want to believe this is an issue with just the platform but the internet landscape has changed and I don't know what to do besides soykafpost on imageboards. >>66186 Gamified system is a good term, I used to describe these as cult like but I think it causes too much controversy

>>67817 do you think the virtue policing of VPS over content (barring cheese pizza of course) should stop?