Struggles with Socialisation on the Indie Web

[infernal.serval]

But I have another question. Did people actually make friends on social media? I don't mean people who would sometimes like their posts back and forth and maybe leave a short comment. I mean people to repeatedly have longer conversations with. To open up with about things that you weren't posting publicly. People who would be there for you during your hard times and vice versa? Or did social media train people to view acquaintances as friends?

I actually met my partner on social media. Before we met it turned out it'd been following my art for a bit and we wound up following each other on Tumblr and in a Discord. It turned out after some time that we lived in the same city so we started hanging out irl as friends, and six months later started dating. We just celebrated our 3rd anniversary last month.    I have had purely online friends on and off as well. The one constant there is that the friendships always happened when we migrated off of social media into messaging apps or working together on writing or artwork.

Edit: spelling

[katevansart]

I think the hardest thing for me is keeping up with everyone's lives. I made a Dreamwidth account because I missed the old Livejournal days. But even with only friending like 10 people I now feel like I need to keep up with my reading page and comment on everyone's stuff. I'm not complaining, it's just feels like something harder to commit to than when I was a teenager commenting on lj entries. I think we're so used to liking things and leaving them that now when I try to really engage with people's content and properly reply it just takes more brain power than I'm used to.