Hi, i thought here is the bestplace to ask about this, is it possible to make new friends on here, what is the most effective way, tell me your experience
Overall, it’s easy to find lemmy friends. People that you’ll recognize, have conversations with, come to enjoy talking to on lemmy/the fediverse.
But, like any online community, there’s a barrier to cross if you expect to be friends elsewhere. It’s relatively easy to run across folks that will chat on discord or matrix. Harder to find people willing to deanonymize any more than that.
As an example, I’m on the paranoid end of things. I haven’t given my real name out online since maybe 2003? Ish. Since then there’s exactly two people that have crossed from a forum to a full friend. One was from here, lemmy in specific. The other is my wife now, and even that took a year or so to become a friendship back in the mid aughts where I disclosed more than name and general location.
But! There’s been plenty of people on the fediverse that I consider friends to some degree or another. Folks that, even when we disagree, I respect and look forward to interacting with.
My whole recipe for making friends at all, in any context, applies here. Be open to people. Extend trust carefully, but with hope. Accept people for who they are within a given range of acceptability (I ain’t hanging with a Nazi, as an extreme example). The rest is just staying chill, being yourself, and letting things develop naturally.
It’s kinda funny though. My friend I met here? Feels like I’ve known him forever, but it’s only been over a year and a half or so. He went from this rando in a fun conversation to one of the best friends I’ve ever had. Dude knows my wife’s name, my address, my kid’s name. I’ve sent him pictures of me, and I don’t even do that with relatives (though, in honesty it was a temporary thing because I don’t trust any messaging service enough to not delete such things).
So it’s possible for sure. Thing with friendship is that you can never force it if you want it to be real and last. Online or meatspace.
I don’t think it is a good place to make friends…
Yeah, I seem to spend half of my time here responding to killjoy puritanical misanthropes, which likely says more about me than I’d like to admit.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s many interesting and intelligent folk here, I’m just not sure it’s the best place to find a pal.
Indeed, I’ve somehow made quite a few enemies.
Well, they actually made themselves. Some people just like to get bent out of shape.
Yeah it’s not really much of a thing here, I think. I mean it’s possible, but mostly it’s linkspam with occasional banter added.
Asking people out for coffee when you find out they live in your area does not work, even if they’re on lemmy asking for advice on how to make friends since they’re new to the city. It was the only time I tried so its the only relevant advice I had to give.
I mean, no one I talked to on here really ended up lasting more than like… 3 days
But you might have better luck, who knows :p
