alt Hacker NewsHow do you make new IRL friends now in 2026? Where are you hanging out online where there is a culture of people not only revealing their location and age (which platforms and individual internet users have become more guarded about), but even meeting up with other users?
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ssl-3 • yesterday at 9:31 PM
How I do it:
My local IRL friends are some folks I met during my days as a BBS sysop ~35 years ago.
My far away IRL friends are folks online where we felt motivated to treat eachother as friends instead of dangerous randos.
(Risky? Perhaps. We're all simply too old to give a shit.)
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Not OP, and I will assume you ask about making irl friends online: niche multiplayer videogames always were the best way to make irl friends. I still have a few friends from a web game where you had to coordinate 5-10 people for ~1h a day (and enemies could counter if they chose to connect around the same time) that I played from 2004 to 2013 (with breaks in between). Later it has mostly Hoi4 and civ6 (which are now less niche, but the mp communities used to be extremely niche before ~2020) (civ6 still is). I have a friend who I've met through another because they played on a SWTOR roleplay server together. Also, now that I remember, a friend of mine turned 40 a year ago, and I was surprised of the younger friends (less than 30) he made. They told me they met through WoW classic, managed to find out they lived close from each other, and decided to hang out/play RPGs (pen and paper) together.