I am not joking when I say that I thinked for hours about how do people find each other in 2025.
Currently, the world is in very weird state. People online are either using social video platforms or they are reading news or lurking in online forums in it’s different shapes and forms.
Most chat platforms that I know had shut down and most alt social platforms are almost dead. Even Hackernews had started to see a lower amount of comments compared to previous years.
I want a serious answer, how should I find people online to talk to about anything really other than politics?
I started watching live stream on twitch of a specific category that interested me. The people who stream this category collaborate with one another and each have their own community of people who follow.
I watched some really small streams and chatted with people. I do mean small as well, probably originally most of these streams had something like 6 viewers. Over a long period of time you come to know people in a stream group - and then because of the collaboration you come to know more people. There is usually a discord server or some such where these people talk when there is no stream as well.
Now, 5 or more years later, I’m probably in something like 18 discord groups where I talk to a lot of people regularly, or DM with quite a lot. By proximity and a loose shared interest, we all now know quite intimate details of each others lives and talk about all kinds of anything and everything.
Friendship is not really a fast process, but you just have to find places to plant seeds and see what grows.