Irl - going places? Blergh. And I am very privileged to work from home. Do you make friends at like the grocery store? I am confused about this, genuinely
Online? Seeing people regularly? I don’t understand how people do this. I just kind of browse popular feed and pop in to what looks interesting. But even when I do look into communities more regularly I don’t like notice people. Do you? I’m seriously asking. Is there a platform where this makes more sense? Back when I used reddit I was more engrained to certain communities but there were so many users everyone felt anonymous. Here there are less users but still enough that people feel anonymous.
for the record I do have autism. I’m also a counselor, funny enough. When people ask me how to make friends I tell them things generally along your advice: to go to places where they can meet more people ideally along lines with common interests. If they really want to focus on this though I usually refer out as this clearly isn’t my strength
Places like the microblogging platforms of fedi like mastodon have worked for us. Reddit and Lemmy tend to be fire and forget, so making friends here whilst possible is less likely than say mastodon for example because mastodon is more about talking to people in our opinion.
There’s also things like Matrix (or Discord) communities which might work especially since DMing is relatively easy and well supported compared to this place.
So my most consistent batch of online friends started out a couple of years ago round Christmas, we were all members of a group from a game and ended up hanging around on their other games server. It kinda evolved from there and we made another separate server so it wasn’t completely open because a couple of the random people didn’t fit too well and we’d kinda formed a group by then. Every so often we get a few new people, some stick.
Therein lies the issue
Irl - going places? Blergh. And I am very privileged to work from home. Do you make friends at like the grocery store? I am confused about this, genuinely
Online? Seeing people regularly? I don’t understand how people do this. I just kind of browse popular feed and pop in to what looks interesting. But even when I do look into communities more regularly I don’t like notice people. Do you? I’m seriously asking. Is there a platform where this makes more sense? Back when I used reddit I was more engrained to certain communities but there were so many users everyone felt anonymous. Here there are less users but still enough that people feel anonymous.
for the record I do have autism. I’m also a counselor, funny enough. When people ask me how to make friends I tell them things generally along your advice: to go to places where they can meet more people ideally along lines with common interests. If they really want to focus on this though I usually refer out as this clearly isn’t my strength
Places like the microblogging platforms of fedi like mastodon have worked for us. Reddit and Lemmy tend to be fire and forget, so making friends here whilst possible is less likely than say mastodon for example because mastodon is more about talking to people in our opinion.
There’s also things like Matrix (or Discord) communities which might work especially since DMing is relatively easy and well supported compared to this place.
So my most consistent batch of online friends started out a couple of years ago round Christmas, we were all members of a group from a game and ended up hanging around on their other games server. It kinda evolved from there and we made another separate server so it wasn’t completely open because a couple of the random people didn’t fit too well and we’d kinda formed a group by then. Every so often we get a few new people, some stick.