As a kid, it's very easy to make friends. You don't need school for that. Three of my child hood best friends were not in my schools. I sill visit one regularly, 20 years later.

In fact, I'll argue that school distort the child ability to socialize, not improve it. Because it's an artificial setup were the crazy values and rules only exist and make sense in the school. And worst, adults sell you values and rules from the real world while you are stuck in this alternate dimension.

And it's an arbitrary cohort of same-age kids. Whereas for example my friends in the neighborhood all were of different ages. Not very different, but still.

That's the biggest thing schools do wrong, in my opinion. Children learn best from each other, but that requires mixing age groups so there's something for them to teach.

It's easier to get to know people in smaller communities where their common communication channel also allows chitchat. E.g. hobbyist forums, game guilds

> I mean, here we are, and I can only remember like 3 usernames in this community. It's not like I'm friends with them either or anything. I think like 99% of us don't really know anybody else here.

I’m here a lot, and I have a list of probably a hundred or so usernames in my head that either post often or have meaningful contributions, many linked to real-life identities. I doubt I could recognize any if they walked by me on the street.

The thing is that the usernames are not very prominent in this UI. They're even always grayed out. It's like it's optimized to not distract users with posts' owners unless they need them. I probably could recognize more if posts came accompanied by profile pictures or something that stands out that's somewhat unique to users. As it is, my brain doesn't have to register anything about the user to read their posts.

The 3 usernames I do remember, it's because one's name somehow stands out to me from their use of capitalization (most use just lowercase), and the others because their username appears in other people's posts (e.g. dang).

> It's like it's optimized to not distract users with posts' owners unless they need them.

I’m fairly sure this is an intentional choice. I can often tell the author from the subject and tone, though ;)

I can only say that I pretty much don't care about folks from my schools, with very few exceptions (say one or two persons).

> Do others here have experience having somewhat deep relationships with people you've only interacted with online?

Sort of, not really, kinda, etc. I had to move pretty much right after graduating HS, went directly into the workforce and now just kinda move around every few years to take a new job. I'm in contact with maybe one friends from HS and will probably never develop close friendships like that again. On the other hand, I'm one few discord servers where we have become moderately close I suppose, and some of us have met up, despite being scattered across the world, but it still feels very superfical. The one advantage the internet gives me is the ability to meet people my age, with similar interests. In real life, theres people I'll hang out with occasionally or events I'll go to, but most of the time I'm the youngest by a decade and it's hard to make real connections.