Maaaaybe. But it's foolish not to recognize that the internet is different from IRL.
As a dumb teenager, I actually had an online "friend" who turned out to be just some dude taking me for a ride - basically, building a relationship around a completely made-up personality. It wasn't about sex or money, which made it even more bizarre. Just something they did to see if they could. I found out when, after months of correspondence and chats, I took a train to another city to meet them. And yes, it could have ended worse.
I talked about this experience with some other folks and found out that it's more common than you'd expect.
Another thing is that online relationships are low maintenance, so they tend to be a lot more "throwaway" in nature. When you use social media, you you feel that you have dozens or hundreds of friends who like your posts, comment, etc. But here's a simple test you can run: just sign off for a month. Quit cold turkey. Chances are, when you come back, there won't be a single message along the lines of "gee, I wonder what happened to <x>", or "hey <x>, haven't heard from you in a while, what's up?". These feed-based friendships aren't all that real.
My son made online friends when he was 14, playing games together with them on Steam. When he is playing a game with them, I often hear him roar with laughter, but they can also be quite serious and talk about life and school. Last month, we took him to Wrocław to meet them, and it was marvelous. My wife and I got to know the parents of these boys (16-17 yo now), had dinner together, and we separated as friends. My son had a blast that week finally meeting them in person.
As an introvert, my best friends I still talk to today are online friends. We met a few times when I was teenager, but then we moved different places. Online communication still goes on.
He's a lucky guy that has parents that understand him.
I met my wife playing Star Wars Galaxies, online. She was member #4 in the guild I ran, The Trade Federation on Flurry, one of a whole crew of people I'd never met in my life. It was a very interesting way to meet, to get to know a person with zero real physical input, no pics (we're too old for that stuff), and we talked on and on about philosophy, life, kids, learning, loving, challenges. For a good while it was just the words, no idea what the other looked like or how old, none of the things you'd normally sort people on before you decide they're worth your time.
The reality is, with no face and no resume in the way, all you've got is the actual person, what they laugh at and how they handle an idea they don't agree with. And in an MMO you see even more, how they solve problems, do quests, handle loot, and deal with moving through the game. That turned out to be the part that actually matters, and it's usually the last thing you learn about someone you met in person, not the first.
At some point we made the leap; she was in Tennessee and I was in California, so meeting in person was a very big deal. I flew out and drove deep into Tennessee, and we met for the first time in a Food City parking lot. It was amazing, we talked for hours.
As they say, "and the rest is history." We married and have been together for 20 years. Meeting her, and a whole crew of people I never met in person but still call friends, is the primary reason I joined the team trying to keep SWG alive [1]. We both still have fond memories of our time together in game, and now in real life.
So when someone tells me online friends aren't real friends, I just smile, because I married mine. And yes, I'm married to a gamer chick, and it's amazing! And all these years later, she's still my friend too. :)
Had plenty of online friends come and go. What I found is that it usually took online relationships longer to get to know each other in some ways, and quicker in other ways.
It was no fun realizing after a few IRL visits that we really just didn't like each other unless careful email communications was our primary means of interaction.
With some folks the time it takes to write an email is all the filter is needed. Sometimes, though, it only takes 5 minutes IRL to realize that you only like the persons email - not the person, themselves.
Here's the problem with online relationships, you can pick them up and drop them whenever you like. You can do that in real life to a degree, but sometimes you are forced to confront friends in real life when you don't want to. A real friend requires surviving a degree of confrontation.
The OP article talks about people met online who they subsequently met and hung out with in person. To me, this is now an meatspace friendship, so yeah, it's "real".
Pure online relationships where you have never met or seen the other person are in my experience an order of magnitude less "real". As you note, there's no 'skin in the game' and ghosting a relationship is zero effort and likely zero consequences, and when everyone knows this is the case the relationships are equally less consequential.
This is the crucial difference. The online abstraction facilitates behaviors that are destructive to friendship, like ghosting, blocking, or even banning if you have admin powers in their meeting place.
Also, since real life is abstracted online, small issues tend to become dramatic because. It takes courage, and some recklessness, to open yourself to a total stranger that might not even be what they claim to be. For us who saw the initial anonymous wild west of the Web, it's difficult to trust people online. It might be different with younger generations that grew up with having their real identity open in several mainstream places.
I agree. Without seeing someone regularly in person or knowing their body language, mannerisms, quirks etc., I find the relationship to be much more disposable. There are people I was friends with in college that I only keep up with over text and those relationships are much more frail than they used to be.
> "In addition, there's generally a lower chance that the friendship develops out of convenience alone. Don't get me wrong, many in-person friendships are born this way and can turn into the most meaningful lifelong connections."
I don't have any "online friends" at the moment, but if I did, I'd have met them in the online equivalent of my city, but not at work and not next door, not in highschool. On the extreme end of convenience, you have precarious, proximity-oriented, passive, almost lazy social activity; you meet the friends at work, and you might invite them to drive out to your bbq in the burbs where you've also invited the people next door and across the lane. On the extreme other end you have friends that occur despite every communication and proximity challenge being thrown in your way. Great friends come from mutual investment despite some level of inconvenience you both can tolerate, and it's my opinion that if the seeds of the friendship are planted only in the shallow soil of easy access, then the plant won't bear much fruit, and may be ripped out of the ground as soon a layoff rolls around.
I don't online friends as meaningfully distinct from the requirements of any other robust type of friendship. They're just formed in the ephemeral online equivalent of a cosmopolitan city. I have strong friendships in different pockets pf the city for different reasons in different circles, and don't think they'd all work well together in the same room. Some I climb mountains with, some I watch movies with, some I play video games with.
Online acquaintances meanwhile, are formed in one discrete silo of interaction and don't stretch beyond it, much like your nextdoor neighbor or coworker.
For online friendship to really work, we need to solve the problem of pig-butchering scammers (scammers who "make friends with you" and eventually get you to give them money somehow, e.g. by depositing money in a "crypto trading platform", sending money for a "health crisis", etc.)
This problem will only get worse with conversational AI agents/deepfakes/etc. For every human seeking genuine friendship there might be 100 AI agent scammers.
Use apps like Snapchat to ensure they are who they say they are (if they refuse to verify via snap or insta's snap feature don't bother with them). If they are not local delete them immediately if they ever ask for money or give a sob story, no matter how long you've been chatting! Protect yourself and don't be a fool as the Internet can be amazing on one side (have many chat buds on Snap and other apps who have verified themselves too and never asked for money) and horrible on the other side(i dont give any others a chance).
> This will be the sixth time that at least one of us has traveled to hang out with the other.
Are these really online friends if you are also recognizing them as real-life humans that exist in the same world you do and treat them like you would any other friend? Aside from maybe the Amish (and even that's questionable if you pay close enough attention to what they are hiding), there is almost nobody who doesn't communicate with friends using electronic devices. That is not a unique property.
"Online friend" only seems like a useful distinction if you truly think of them as a some kind of nebulous chat entity that comes to you via a connected device, where specific implementation details be it human, AI, space alien, or magical fairy doesn't play into the experience. Where if you eventually found out that it was actually ChatGPT on the other end you wouldn't be disappointed.
The definitions seem kind of arbitrary, online friend seems to mean either:
1. friend who you primarily communicate online
2. friend where initial contact was made online
Option 1 seems odd, especially for friends who have moved. Are they reclassified as "online friend"? Option 2 represents only a single moment in time and seems to have little bearing on everything past that initial contact.
Also some people seem to classify "real friend" as "friend that I physically see on a regular basis".
> Option 2 represents only a single moment in time and seems to have little bearing on everything past that initial contact.
It has bearing indefinitely because it means you likely need to travel in order to interact offline.
Friends who've moved might or might not eventually demote to "online friend" status, in a similar way to how they might or might not demote to "used to be friends" status, I suppose.
I think having to travel (and doing it) in order to see people you initially met online is different from knowing people in your physical area and choosing to sometimes interact online instead.
I once read about a father who told his daughter, "real friends are people who care how your life ends up." I think that's a pretty good definition to go by.
If someone you call a "friend" ditches you just like that. I think maybe you're too quick to call people friends.
Yes, online people can disappear, but I have online friends whom I've been talking to for the past 12 years (basically all the way back to when i returned to the social internet).
It's really all about trust and time, like any other friendship.
Real-life friends are ditching each other commonly these days, because the Block function on Whatsapp (or whatever app they use to communicate) seems so convenient and consequence-free.
In 2026, the way that friends who don't see each other at work/school arrange to meet and maintain that friendship, is via WhatsApp or the local equivalent.
This doesn't match my experience with friendship at all. Almost all of my friends it takes at least some positive effort to continue our relationship. I at least have to respond to messages or answer phone calls. People end real-life friendships all the time.
I work fulltime and have 2 kids still at home by myself. I made my two best friends on MMORPGs, one on FFXIV almost 10 years ago now, and one in Black Desert just talking about black metal bands we both liked in server chat.
I have acquaintances IRL, mostly from work. But my actual friends are people who I've never met face-to-face.
I am the complete opposite. I like my pseudo-anonymity (I figured with enough effort some one could figure out who I am) and the freedom to be an idiot or have a bad day online that comes with that.
How do you make online friends? I’ve been on Reddit for many years and have rarely even DM’ed anyone. I’ve also tried apps like Boo but the conversations always fizzle out.
Back in the good 'old' days, by playing repeatedly on the same server. On many games I've played (JK, UT, COD1-4), the servers just turned into giant chat rooms after 9pm or so. You play some games, chat a bit, then hang out on TeamSpeak.
I have no idea how people do it nowadays, gaming seems to have lost that social touch (at least to me).
I've been running my server for about 6 years already, and it's a pretty strong community of around 20 or so people. Sometimes we get new people, not everyone is a perfect fit and they might stay for a few weeks before leaving. Some have left after a few years, some leave and come back; others come every so many months to chat for a day or two before going away.
There's many different types of relationships that can be formed in places like that.
I think what's most important is that there needs to be something you all share for it to work. Maybe it's anime, sports, whatever (in my particular case, it's an LGBT server).
I've already met around 5-6 people from this server IRL, and so far it's always been a great time.
Mostly on technologies that enables people talking. My first online friends, were from using IRC; I even made local friends, I would never without using the online way. Then I made friends using simple emails to far away people. Next I remember I did a lot of friends using SecondLife, were i found out about "mein sonnenshein", a virtual friend i virtually married 4 times and divorce four times also (it was very cheap like 10 cents to marry and 25 to divorce, lol) and a lot of other good friends; last one i got it in a MMORPG where i saw a "beautiful" elf warrior and started talking to her, and it results she spoke the same language and were in another continent. There is been a lot of time over, but i still make contact with some of them. I would dare to say that the virtual friends were as good as the real ones, because in the end we are all humans and connected with language, and resonate in many ways.
Shared interests on small chat platforms. Discords for a niche subject replaced the old IRC channels. Twitch chats for small-medium streamers also work similarly (which was based on IRC!)
You have to join a more restrict community such as the FIFA PRO Clubs or the Rainbow Six teams or whatever is restrict and gaming thing . The general chatter/board where a plethora of people hangout such as reddit won't get you anywhere just like real life
Reddit hasn't really facilitated friendships (let alone the kind leading to real-life meetups) since the 2018 redesign at least; even before that the site was remarkably impersonal compared to any old-school forum.
Discord's not a bad way if there's a shared interest. I met some great people on a server dedicated to a hockey team. We'd all watch the game and blather away in chat. You get to know them after a while.
For me, it was a Twitch chat community. It started with everyone showing up the same time every week to watch a couple of people who streamed together. They eventually started a Discord server when Discord became available (which decreased the closeness of the actual Twitch chat community in some ways by making it all more asynchronous, imo, but did also solidify the community beyond Twitch in other ways). I've been to several meetups where I met many of those people, and have also separately met the two streamers a couple of times as well. I consider a number of them "online friends" to a varying degree.
I think something like Reddit would be unlikely to lead to this sort of thing, unless you're regularly participating in a small enough subreddit in a consistent/repetitive manner so as to recognize and be recognized by others (for example, I once helped run a little fanfic book club in a show's subreddit, and if that had gone on for longer, then I could see myself having gotten to know the other co-organizers a little better).
The key is probably to have some shared interest to bring you to the same place, but also an environment that's flexible enough to sometimes talk about things outside of the main interest. Older forums that would have an off-topic board were probably better about this than Reddit, since Reddit tends to segregate discussion about different topics into different places (with different people).
photos don't help much, actually it would be more about not hearing them before, but i guess my age is showing, in the 2020s everybody has voice chats regularly i guess. but before i was uncomfortable hearing and seeing the body language of someone. it's quite immature but it's something that happens. and beyond that, a relationship online may not be the same as in person.. when everyone has its own space and can come and go at any time, it's free-er
Maaaaybe. But it's foolish not to recognize that the internet is different from IRL.
As a dumb teenager, I actually had an online "friend" who turned out to be just some dude taking me for a ride - basically, building a relationship around a completely made-up personality. It wasn't about sex or money, which made it even more bizarre. Just something they did to see if they could. I found out when, after months of correspondence and chats, I took a train to another city to meet them. And yes, it could have ended worse.
I talked about this experience with some other folks and found out that it's more common than you'd expect.
Another thing is that online relationships are low maintenance, so they tend to be a lot more "throwaway" in nature. When you use social media, you you feel that you have dozens or hundreds of friends who like your posts, comment, etc. But here's a simple test you can run: just sign off for a month. Quit cold turkey. Chances are, when you come back, there won't be a single message along the lines of "gee, I wonder what happened to <x>", or "hey <x>, haven't heard from you in a while, what's up?". These feed-based friendships aren't all that real.
My son made online friends when he was 14, playing games together with them on Steam. When he is playing a game with them, I often hear him roar with laughter, but they can also be quite serious and talk about life and school. Last month, we took him to Wrocław to meet them, and it was marvelous. My wife and I got to know the parents of these boys (16-17 yo now), had dinner together, and we separated as friends. My son had a blast that week finally meeting them in person.
As an introvert, my best friends I still talk to today are online friends. We met a few times when I was teenager, but then we moved different places. Online communication still goes on.
He's a lucky guy that has parents that understand him.
I met my wife playing Star Wars Galaxies, online. She was member #4 in the guild I ran, The Trade Federation on Flurry, one of a whole crew of people I'd never met in my life. It was a very interesting way to meet, to get to know a person with zero real physical input, no pics (we're too old for that stuff), and we talked on and on about philosophy, life, kids, learning, loving, challenges. For a good while it was just the words, no idea what the other looked like or how old, none of the things you'd normally sort people on before you decide they're worth your time.
The reality is, with no face and no resume in the way, all you've got is the actual person, what they laugh at and how they handle an idea they don't agree with. And in an MMO you see even more, how they solve problems, do quests, handle loot, and deal with moving through the game. That turned out to be the part that actually matters, and it's usually the last thing you learn about someone you met in person, not the first.
At some point we made the leap; she was in Tennessee and I was in California, so meeting in person was a very big deal. I flew out and drove deep into Tennessee, and we met for the first time in a Food City parking lot. It was amazing, we talked for hours.
As they say, "and the rest is history." We married and have been together for 20 years. Meeting her, and a whole crew of people I never met in person but still call friends, is the primary reason I joined the team trying to keep SWG alive [1]. We both still have fond memories of our time together in game, and now in real life.
So when someone tells me online friends aren't real friends, I just smile, because I married mine. And yes, I'm married to a gamer chick, and it's amazing! And all these years later, she's still my friend too. :)
[1] https://www.swgemu.com/forums/showthread.php?t=216279
Had plenty of online friends come and go. What I found is that it usually took online relationships longer to get to know each other in some ways, and quicker in other ways.
It was no fun realizing after a few IRL visits that we really just didn't like each other unless careful email communications was our primary means of interaction.
With some folks the time it takes to write an email is all the filter is needed. Sometimes, though, it only takes 5 minutes IRL to realize that you only like the persons email - not the person, themselves.
> Sometimes, though, it only takes 5 minutes IRL to realize that you only like the persons email - not the person, themselves.
A great point that’s also true in reverse.
Here's the problem with online relationships, you can pick them up and drop them whenever you like. You can do that in real life to a degree, but sometimes you are forced to confront friends in real life when you don't want to. A real friend requires surviving a degree of confrontation.
The OP article talks about people met online who they subsequently met and hung out with in person. To me, this is now an meatspace friendship, so yeah, it's "real".
Pure online relationships where you have never met or seen the other person are in my experience an order of magnitude less "real". As you note, there's no 'skin in the game' and ghosting a relationship is zero effort and likely zero consequences, and when everyone knows this is the case the relationships are equally less consequential.
This is the crucial difference. The online abstraction facilitates behaviors that are destructive to friendship, like ghosting, blocking, or even banning if you have admin powers in their meeting place.
Also, since real life is abstracted online, small issues tend to become dramatic because. It takes courage, and some recklessness, to open yourself to a total stranger that might not even be what they claim to be. For us who saw the initial anonymous wild west of the Web, it's difficult to trust people online. It might be different with younger generations that grew up with having their real identity open in several mainstream places.
I agree. Without seeing someone regularly in person or knowing their body language, mannerisms, quirks etc., I find the relationship to be much more disposable. There are people I was friends with in college that I only keep up with over text and those relationships are much more frail than they used to be.
I think a more salient point is made here:
> "In addition, there's generally a lower chance that the friendship develops out of convenience alone. Don't get me wrong, many in-person friendships are born this way and can turn into the most meaningful lifelong connections."
I don't have any "online friends" at the moment, but if I did, I'd have met them in the online equivalent of my city, but not at work and not next door, not in highschool. On the extreme end of convenience, you have precarious, proximity-oriented, passive, almost lazy social activity; you meet the friends at work, and you might invite them to drive out to your bbq in the burbs where you've also invited the people next door and across the lane. On the extreme other end you have friends that occur despite every communication and proximity challenge being thrown in your way. Great friends come from mutual investment despite some level of inconvenience you both can tolerate, and it's my opinion that if the seeds of the friendship are planted only in the shallow soil of easy access, then the plant won't bear much fruit, and may be ripped out of the ground as soon a layoff rolls around.
I don't online friends as meaningfully distinct from the requirements of any other robust type of friendship. They're just formed in the ephemeral online equivalent of a cosmopolitan city. I have strong friendships in different pockets pf the city for different reasons in different circles, and don't think they'd all work well together in the same room. Some I climb mountains with, some I watch movies with, some I play video games with.
Online acquaintances meanwhile, are formed in one discrete silo of interaction and don't stretch beyond it, much like your nextdoor neighbor or coworker.
For online friendship to really work, we need to solve the problem of pig-butchering scammers (scammers who "make friends with you" and eventually get you to give them money somehow, e.g. by depositing money in a "crypto trading platform", sending money for a "health crisis", etc.)
This problem will only get worse with conversational AI agents/deepfakes/etc. For every human seeking genuine friendship there might be 100 AI agent scammers.
Use apps like Snapchat to ensure they are who they say they are (if they refuse to verify via snap or insta's snap feature don't bother with them). If they are not local delete them immediately if they ever ask for money or give a sob story, no matter how long you've been chatting! Protect yourself and don't be a fool as the Internet can be amazing on one side (have many chat buds on Snap and other apps who have verified themselves too and never asked for money) and horrible on the other side(i dont give any others a chance).
What do you mean snap feature? Can you explain?
> This will be the sixth time that at least one of us has traveled to hang out with the other.
Are these really online friends if you are also recognizing them as real-life humans that exist in the same world you do and treat them like you would any other friend? Aside from maybe the Amish (and even that's questionable if you pay close enough attention to what they are hiding), there is almost nobody who doesn't communicate with friends using electronic devices. That is not a unique property.
"Online friend" only seems like a useful distinction if you truly think of them as a some kind of nebulous chat entity that comes to you via a connected device, where specific implementation details be it human, AI, space alien, or magical fairy doesn't play into the experience. Where if you eventually found out that it was actually ChatGPT on the other end you wouldn't be disappointed.
The definitions seem kind of arbitrary, online friend seems to mean either:
1. friend who you primarily communicate online
2. friend where initial contact was made online
Option 1 seems odd, especially for friends who have moved. Are they reclassified as "online friend"? Option 2 represents only a single moment in time and seems to have little bearing on everything past that initial contact.
Also some people seem to classify "real friend" as "friend that I physically see on a regular basis".
> Option 2 represents only a single moment in time and seems to have little bearing on everything past that initial contact.
It has bearing indefinitely because it means you likely need to travel in order to interact offline.
Friends who've moved might or might not eventually demote to "online friend" status, in a similar way to how they might or might not demote to "used to be friends" status, I suppose.
I think having to travel (and doing it) in order to see people you initially met online is different from knowing people in your physical area and choosing to sometimes interact online instead.
I once read about a father who told his daughter, "real friends are people who care how your life ends up." I think that's a pretty good definition to go by.
Hard disagree. Online friends are easy to ditch. Real life friends are around wether you like it or not. That fact alone has huge repercussions.
If someone you call a "friend" ditches you just like that. I think maybe you're too quick to call people friends.
Yes, online people can disappear, but I have online friends whom I've been talking to for the past 12 years (basically all the way back to when i returned to the social internet).
It's really all about trust and time, like any other friendship.
Presumably that depends on the context in which your 'real life' friends see you
Does this come from experience or?
My best friends are friends I made due to my software hobby when I was a child. Hard to find such group concentrated in my proximity at the time.
I still continue to talk and meet with them every once in a while even though we are continents apart.
Real-life friends are ditching each other commonly these days, because the Block function on Whatsapp (or whatever app they use to communicate) seems so convenient and consequence-free.
Maybe I'm old school, but if you can erase someone from your life because you block them on an app, this probably was not 'real-life'?
In 2026, the way that friends who don't see each other at work/school arrange to meet and maintain that friendship, is via WhatsApp or the local equivalent.
This doesn't match my experience with friendship at all. Almost all of my friends it takes at least some positive effort to continue our relationship. I at least have to respond to messages or answer phone calls. People end real-life friendships all the time.
The only situations you can't stop seeing someone you don't like IRL are:
1) School 2) Work 3) Very small town
If you live in a major metro area, it's pretty easy to not see people, especially if you're actively wanting to avoid them.
How is that really any different than screening their phone calls or ignoring them if they come to the door?
There are very few people that are schizoid enough to intentionally ignore a friend who comes to their door.
I work fulltime and have 2 kids still at home by myself. I made my two best friends on MMORPGs, one on FFXIV almost 10 years ago now, and one in Black Desert just talking about black metal bands we both liked in server chat.
I have acquaintances IRL, mostly from work. But my actual friends are people who I've never met face-to-face.
I have 3 long term online friends which I've kept in touch with for over a decade but I never met them offline (only 2 I met over video chat).
There are a couple people I've met on HN, then emailed with, then met IRL.
There are also some people I've known IRL, who then saw my stuff on HN and reconnected with me IRL.
The former is neat, but the latter is even better.
I am the complete opposite. I like my pseudo-anonymity (I figured with enough effort some one could figure out who I am) and the freedom to be an idiot or have a bad day online that comes with that.
How do you make online friends? I’ve been on Reddit for many years and have rarely even DM’ed anyone. I’ve also tried apps like Boo but the conversations always fizzle out.
Back in the good 'old' days, by playing repeatedly on the same server. On many games I've played (JK, UT, COD1-4), the servers just turned into giant chat rooms after 9pm or so. You play some games, chat a bit, then hang out on TeamSpeak.
I have no idea how people do it nowadays, gaming seems to have lost that social touch (at least to me).
Now a days I'd say discord is the best.
I've been running my server for about 6 years already, and it's a pretty strong community of around 20 or so people. Sometimes we get new people, not everyone is a perfect fit and they might stay for a few weeks before leaving. Some have left after a few years, some leave and come back; others come every so many months to chat for a day or two before going away.
There's many different types of relationships that can be formed in places like that.
I think what's most important is that there needs to be something you all share for it to work. Maybe it's anime, sports, whatever (in my particular case, it's an LGBT server).
I've already met around 5-6 people from this server IRL, and so far it's always been a great time.
Mostly on technologies that enables people talking. My first online friends, were from using IRC; I even made local friends, I would never without using the online way. Then I made friends using simple emails to far away people. Next I remember I did a lot of friends using SecondLife, were i found out about "mein sonnenshein", a virtual friend i virtually married 4 times and divorce four times also (it was very cheap like 10 cents to marry and 25 to divorce, lol) and a lot of other good friends; last one i got it in a MMORPG where i saw a "beautiful" elf warrior and started talking to her, and it results she spoke the same language and were in another continent. There is been a lot of time over, but i still make contact with some of them. I would dare to say that the virtual friends were as good as the real ones, because in the end we are all humans and connected with language, and resonate in many ways.
Shared interests on small chat platforms. Discords for a niche subject replaced the old IRC channels. Twitch chats for small-medium streamers also work similarly (which was based on IRC!)
I find that niche Discords are so much harder to find and join than niche IRC channels used to be
You have to join a more restrict community such as the FIFA PRO Clubs or the Rainbow Six teams or whatever is restrict and gaming thing . The general chatter/board where a plethora of people hangout such as reddit won't get you anywhere just like real life
Reddit hasn't really facilitated friendships (let alone the kind leading to real-life meetups) since the 2018 redesign at least; even before that the site was remarkably impersonal compared to any old-school forum.
Discord's not a bad way if there's a shared interest. I met some great people on a server dedicated to a hockey team. We'd all watch the game and blather away in chat. You get to know them after a while.
For me, it was a Twitch chat community. It started with everyone showing up the same time every week to watch a couple of people who streamed together. They eventually started a Discord server when Discord became available (which decreased the closeness of the actual Twitch chat community in some ways by making it all more asynchronous, imo, but did also solidify the community beyond Twitch in other ways). I've been to several meetups where I met many of those people, and have also separately met the two streamers a couple of times as well. I consider a number of them "online friends" to a varying degree.
I think something like Reddit would be unlikely to lead to this sort of thing, unless you're regularly participating in a small enough subreddit in a consistent/repetitive manner so as to recognize and be recognized by others (for example, I once helped run a little fanfic book club in a show's subreddit, and if that had gone on for longer, then I could see myself having gotten to know the other co-organizers a little better).
The key is probably to have some shared interest to bring you to the same place, but also an environment that's flexible enough to sometimes talk about things outside of the main interest. Older forums that would have an off-topic board were probably better about this than Reddit, since Reddit tends to segregate discussion about different topics into different places (with different people).
anybody got into the online to IRL issue where you pictured the person differently and it didn't survive the meeting ?
Meeting an online friend IRL without ever having seen a photo of them is odd.
photos don't help much, actually it would be more about not hearing them before, but i guess my age is showing, in the 2020s everybody has voice chats regularly i guess. but before i was uncomfortable hearing and seeing the body language of someone. it's quite immature but it's something that happens. and beyond that, a relationship online may not be the same as in person.. when everyone has its own space and can come and go at any time, it's free-er
Rehab friends are real friends, but a person shouldn't ever want to experience the circumstances necessary to have rehab friends.
Online friends are as real as sending racy photos then getting extorted for Google Play cards.