I might be hopelessly behind the times, but I’ve never made a friend online. All the friends I’ve ever made I’ve met in person, or I’ve met through someone I’ve met in person. I suppose technically because COVID-19 forced school and work into virtual realms, I’ve met my school and work friends on Zoom or Teams or WebEx in the past two years. Perhaps they count as online friends?

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I’ve never made a friend through an online community. I’ve never made friends with an account. A handle. An avatar. A profile with some biographical stats and some witty signature at the bottom. I am fully aware that making friends online is an utterly commonplace thing here in 2022, but to me it still feels indefinably foreign, like something out of a 1990s cyberpunk novel.

Now of course I’ve read through hundreds of thousands if not millions of posts: bulletin boards, blogs, comment sections, and there are many bloggers and commenters who I admire and follow, but I never once decided to pick out one of those accounts and tell them, I want to be friends with you. I observe and do not participate. The Internet may be a giant forum chattering with activity, but I move through it merely as a ghost. A lurker.

Last weekend in one of our monthly group-calls, my friend told us about friends she made online. She was like nine or ten, and she had an online presence on deviantART. She became very close with a friend she met online, just as close as if not closer than her in-person/IRL/meatspace friends. They’d chat about art and fandom and pop culture together, but also on what was going on in their own lives. Eventually they met when she was thirteen or fourteen, kept hanging out for a year or two, and then drifted apart for the same kinds of reasons that in-person friends can drift apart.

And all the while I was thinking, was this normal for a kid growing up in the ‘00s? Making friends with someone who might live three thousand miles away from you and whose face you might never see? What if she turned out not to be who she said she was? When I was growing up in that decade, my impression of the Internet was that it was this wild and lawless place, crawling with predators and edgelords, where no one had to know who you were and so posters could say extremely offensive things under cover of anonymity. My parents would ask me what I was watching on the Internet and furrow their brows if they hadn’t heard of it. YouTube videos of people playing “Maple Leaf Rag” were on the edge of okay. In computer lab in middle school, we were taught How To Be Safe On The Internet and Cyberbullying Is A Big Problem and Don’t Talk To Strangers and Never Cite Wikipedia. We typed the URLs on our lab sheets directly into the address bar, all the way from the http to the query strings, because we couldn’t trust the Google search results.

Certainly I never conceived of making a friend out of the scary strangers who lived on the Internet.

But maybe this was normal? I’m flying up to meet a very good friend (who I only met in person six months after we met in Zoom school), and she’s also talked about having Purely Internet Friends, some of whom she’s never met in person. Maybe everyone makes some of her friends this way, my experience with the Internet in the ‘00s was the odd one out. Maybe I’m living twenty years behind, and everyone else is living in the future.

And maybe it was even expected? Surely if you hung around communities formed around a shared love of Harry Potter or logic puzzles or Neopets, you’d meet more kindred souls than by chance? Surely shared interests would be more predictive of friendship compatibility than geography or bloodline? There are so many ways, obvious in hindsight, that the Internet is conducive to strong friendships. If my somewhat staid childhood community had instead been a little less panicky about Internet Stranger Danger, would I have grown close to a completely different (and less geographically tethered) set of friends?

I’m not sure. I still feel safer as an observer than a participant, hiding behind a glass screen and watching the bustling town square through my seventh-floor window. But so long as I’m trying to hit all these developmental milestones as a twenty-something in the early ‘20s, maybe I ought to give Internet friendship a try?