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?
You did it. Count me among the folks who would reply to you.
Hi what do you want to talk about? Im down to chat.
I DM’d you.
Finding community in the modern age requires you to get interested and participate in something specific. Specific communities are often on Discord or equivalent, for example I’m super into some very specific video games with thriving communities, into specific genres of books and have found like minded people, love chatting about specific computing topics, etc. Specialize your interests and find others who have done the same
This is exactly it. A lot of my good friends are from my old smash melee days, and my current circle is mostly from destiny 2. I don’t play either game these days or keep in the loop with the games’ overall communities, but that doesn’t change much with this crew. Hell, someone I met through destiny LFG years ago flew out to my wedding last year.
You know any discord servers for readers of sci-fi? I’ve looked around a couple times and the ones I’ve found are either tiny and inactive or huge and have way too much going on.
Find a discord server with some folks you share interests with and talk to them. I joined a ~300-person gaming/tabletop community a couple years ago and while I don’t have any really close friends among them, they’re great to chat and hang out and play games with. I’ve taken to spending the last couple hours of most days just hanging out in voice with people and shooting the shit, it’s great.
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.
