Aliases give you the option of more easily disassociating things from your legal identity, as well as making it harder for people to find all the embarassing shit you posted when you were a teenager.

If you prefer using an alias that’s totally cool!

Anyone who does chat would immediately have a common interest.

Because it's niche, there tends to be original or unique ideas, making connection easier.

That being said, you can't hide your identity and sing it loud and proud to any and everyone. My blog is anonymous so there's no friend catcher effect.

This is absolutely true, regardless of the medium - but the internet allows you to do this at scale. If you have an unconventional idea, it makes sense to try to seek out the few like minded people with whom you can discuss. However, in today's world I would be very cautious of encouraging anyone of building their own echo chamber. It's one thing to go against the grain and seek out like mindedness; it's another to live in an echo chamber.

It seems more difficult to make friends the older I get. I think at least part of it is that everyone is so busy.

I couldn't help but pattern-match to this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUlxth701GM

I am not that into killing hornets right now, but I will be moving to the countryside soon. I might hit you up later this month to talk about killing them, if that's alright.

But I haven’t met anyone online that I have any in person contact with in a long long time. Although I haven’t really made any friends online in ages either, most of my communication with strangers seems to be one off messages like these HN comments that have no real hope of ever developing into anything else. I guess friendships develop in chat rooms rather than comment boards, which is how I became friends with the people I did become friends with.

It’s definitely a lot harder the older I get and it’s quite frustrating. People are busier, I’m busier, makes it hard. Even just going out, the majority of people are a lot younger than me, which is fine for hanging out (I hung out with people my age when I was the same age as the people I see now), but I find it extremely difficult to build a deeper connection or relationship with them, I guess I feel like the creepy older guy sometimes so I stay distant. Double so for dating. It doesn’t help that I have anxiety, I suppose. My core friend group are great and we do hang out, but yeah, they’re busy, most have kids too, which makes it very hard to just casually meet up.

The drawback is, long term retention is not high in such a location. Its not nice to see people with whom you connected so well leave. But its endlessly better than some stale rural place where you either have really close people from childhood/school years, or you are pretty lonely.

Many would be surprised to find out the friendships they made weren’t really friendships after all but mere acquaintances even if they felt like intimate friendships..

I am tied to several communities where there is a whole lot of overlap between people online and in-person activities. For instance, I am involved with a long-running folk festival in Texas that has a large community, and many of those people are on social media. It's a fairly regular thing that I meet people at that festival who I'd previously only met in online spaces.

Similarly, I play music and I rock climb. I'm also involved in several forums for those activities. I've met up with quite a few folks over the years who I only knew from those forums, mostly because both those activities often require other people to participate.

Your point that "everyone is busy" is correct, I think. The big factor is what people are busy doing and finding the folks who are already busy doing things you would like to do.

I was also part of an online trivia group for a long time and met a lot of people from that many times (and married and divorced one of them).

I assume similar things still happen these days in Reddit and Facebook groups but I seem to have drifted away from that kind of online activity.

For me, it’s intolerance. I have a low threshold for bullshit, the (intentionally?) inarticulate, and stubbornness in conversation.

I’ve kept some friends. We’ve physically separated, but we stay in touch and meet in person. Making new ones is indeed challenging.

I started surfing the web in the early 00's when I was like 3 or 4 yo so it sticked to me the whole nickname thing way before asking for First Name and Last Name, cell phone, ID number, street address was the norm (depending on the service ofc)

One day I hope to be able to meet a friend from Moscow. Even if Russia shares a border with my home country Norway, it is impossible for us to meet in person at the moment. The russian fellow took over my open source project when I had lost interest in it.

I've met people IRL from Finland, Lebanon, South Africa, basically all over the world, who I met online. Sometimes I would introduce my real name only when we met IRL.

Not using my real name has not held me back from meeting new people, online or IRL.

I was driving near his area so I took a detour, visited him home and we chatted for like an hour.

We totally forgot to exchange real names :)

Maybe it's just the people I have added on LinkedIn but it always strikes me as a very superficial place and not the one for deeper connections or discussions about projects. Twitter on the other side seems to be more promising (at least in my case).

While my posting cadence of "something interesting" every few months works well for Reddit, that's not something that gets people to follow and engage with you on Twitter.

In my case, doing nonprofit/volunteer work has been a great place to make new friends (and the occasional enemy).

Sadly not interested in nonprofit volunteering at the moment, too worried just making ends meet. London’s very expensive these days and wages aren't great.

After you built up a few interesting accounts finding more accounts via Twitter is easier and less noisy.

I think there may be other places with a higher density of very specific purpose, like angel.co

edit: this point is made in the article - "The beginners guides to everything have already been written. What’s missing is more advanced content."

I guess the specificity of the discussion is the main thing interesting there, provided startups are your thing.

For other things, hobbies etc., there may be more specific places where you get a concentration of focused discussion on a topic.

If you want to find friends (not just potential business associates), I suggest trying to find some other personal interest of yours that isn't money-related. Perhaps sharing on a different platform as well.

It's these kind of topics that I enjoy talking to people about though. I get very quickly bored if we talk about other stuff. Sad I know.

https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apatio11%20friend-catcher...

just worth noting.

The projects I started working on with strangers are mostly dead, but I still meet up and spend a lot of time with a handful of them. Even the example I made of Francesco and Fabrizio are of people that met online serendipitously and now have been business partners and friends for almost 10 years

What makes discord better medium

- Ability to have single / threaded chats

- Multiple channels (#general #help #more-nieche)

- Instant transition between voice and text channels

- Able to screencast (watch content together, explain understand better)

- Stimulating being together, not necessarily talking (music channels, work together channels)

The best ones might be activity centred discord channels, like translating mangas. But, at that point, discord isn't the friend catcher anyway.

One of my favourite servers which I later joined as mod is Tools for thought [0] (15k+ members) which is a space for discussing new tools, productivity, workflow, help with tools and similar stuff.

https://forthought.tools/

Met some people from the forum, started making music, going out to clubs etc. 20 years later not only has my life been shaped by those encounters so have many other people who know me!