How do I make friends online without using data-hungry social media?

[Memory]

Considering that there exist entire essays on "About Me" pages it shouldn't be that hard to find someone you like, and could be argued to be easier to find interesting people on the web-revival than social media. It's just that contacting them is a challenge.

The only person on the non-social-media side online that I could say is a friend is the creator of the Melonland forum. Melonking, because he is the only person I actively try and talk to privately on the web-revival. I also have a lot of trust in him and is nice to me.

When it comes to making friends here, I would mainly suggest trying to find any contact information on a person and simply try to start a conversation from there. While it maybe harder to make friends here vs social media, it's usually best to try and reach out to others that may seem worth your time.

But that's only if you can find a way to keep track of them as they could be anywhere.

There are many standards of contacting that you simply have to keep up with, in the case of Melonking (this isn't to blame him as I understand his reasoning) I use to rely on his Discord as that's simply what I was use to until he told me that he was moving away from Discord and told me to use alternate communications instead (email, Melonland Forum DMs, etc). While I am lucky that Melonking is a easy person to find on the web-revival but when it comes to lesser known figures keeping track can be hard, especially when they decide to move! So many different preferences from different users that it can make you not want to talk to them sometimes!

[Yuvi]

What immediately comes to my mind personally is replacements for some of these services. For discord, Revolt is honestly a pretty decent alternative for finding people as, well yeah matrix is kinda full of those kinda ppl...

as for twitter, Bluesky has been amazing as well. I don't like that Bluesky isn't decentralized but its definitely a lot better and its still FOSS (i think) as well. its algorithm doesn't focus on making you stay for as long as possible, just to give you things you would actually enjoy.

its totally understandable if you want to avoid something like bluesky though.

[Bede]

With people talking about Discord and Discord alternatives, I thought I'd share this video, which is review of two popular Discord alternatives from the point of view of someone who's already used Discord. Namely, he's reviewing the pros and cons of Revolt and Matrix, both of which have been mentioned already in this thread. It's good for figuring out which one is for you, if you're looking into using a privacy-focused Discord alternative :>

[eezstreet]

It's very difficult to make friends on the Internet these days no matter what services you use. People are very plugged in. When you're talking to someone, they are only half paying attention to you. In group chats and on Twitter, it feels like you're just screaming into the void. People are less comfortable talking one on one, since there are so many scammers and shady people. So what difference does it make?

I'd like to argue that this type of thing is very difficult to measure quantitatively as we don't know exactly how many people are lurking vs how many people are contributing content.

I for one find it very difficult to engage myself with social media enough to want to post anything. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I feel much more comfortable lurking than posting anything. Probably because in other spaces, it's too easy for someone to mouth off or post some kind of zinger/ratio bait than to actually engage with you.

There very well might be many other people who are like myself. Or there might not be any at all. If you're yelling into a dark room and nobody responds, does that mean that nobody heard you? I like to think that maybe my relationship with social media shouldn't be defined by an expectation of somebody hearing what I have to say or otherwise interacting with it.

[Yoylecake420]

It is definitely harder, but generally the rule of thumb is (just like in real life) to interact in spaces that are tailored to your interests; like you are doing right now already!

Forums, game servers, chat rooms, fan sites, even mailing lists. Without social media, this is a bit more difficult since most of those meetup spaces are using unethical services like Discord, Facebook or Twitter, but if you're proactive and willing to put a mail or two out there every once in a while when you see a cool person's site, that should do the trick.

For example, before social media, I found good friends on my country's major Minecraft forum because we bonded over being queer; we built a user group (it was a feature back in the days), made a chat room for that friend group, played things together and eventually I started dating one of them and now we've been together for eight years.

This. As you said, it may be harder, but it will be worth it. The thing with unethical social media is that it is easier, but sometimes you're much better going the hard way.

[GlitchWolf47]

ok genuine question, how do you make online friends here

Like Im very socially awkward, but also haven't actually been online that long (and half the time i was "online" is debatable cuz I wasnt even allowed to interact with people) so i am a bit awkward in terms of interacting with people. Ive been getting better recently and doing things like posting on forums and signing guestbooks and joining chatboxes (like onio.club) but i still do not understand how people make online friends

Like yk, specifically on the indieweb, like how do you go from just linking each other's sites to genuinely calling yourselves friends? like idk maybe im kinda missing context like the timeline or like other ways people interact but idk.

And also related note: what advice do you have for like, joining chatrooms that already have kinda established users who are buddies and know each other (for example, Kuroi's chat) like I feel really awkward just butting my head in and I never have any idea on what to say unless theres some conversation going on.

Like idk i just wanna get better at online chatting and like possibly make some buddies but i have no idea what to do

[Corgithellama]

Its pretty hard to make friends online now days but if you find someone cool or whatever you should send them an email! introduce yourself if you want to :)