Social networks love to throw around the term "friend" as though all the kinds of relationships it denotes are the same. Clearly, it isn't.
There are people I know from mailing lists and newsgroups and fora who are my acquaintances, even though we've never met in meatspace. I have cried over their deaths and been happy at news of their joys.
There are people I remember from tens of years and thousands of miles away, whom I hear from more regularly because of social media networks. That's nice. It's low effort for me, it's low effort for them, and we all get more out of it than we put in.
If what you mean by the word "friend" is, someone who will answer your call in the middle of the night and bring over a shovel and a tarp -- I have only a few of those. Those relationships take more work, and are not fully sustained by social media, though they may be partially supported by it.
Your mention of mailing lists/fora/newsgroups made me wonder about how easy it is for people today to forge those same (non-"friends", but still) close relationships with strangers today. I definitely remember those close bonds with other internet users in the 1990s and early millennium.
However, today due to everyone moving to Facebook and other content silos with a mobile app, independent website forums are severely hollowing out. On some of the forums about various hobbies that I follow, the most active posters left are often extremely curmudgeonly elderly people, and if they hail from very polarized countries they are quick to descend into political rants to the point that they do little on-topic posting. Facebook isn’t a satisfying place for friendship due to the feeds and algorithms, and independent forums can now be high-stress environments. Consequently, the internet feels like a more lonely place than before.
People being people, they can use any medium they can find to make acquaintances.
Tools being tools, some of them are better than others.
Here's a list of subjects that I know people have bonded over:
- fandom of specific works
- generic fandom
- fish aquaria
- genre literature
- a period of history
- games (video, board, role-playing, LARP...)
- sports
- watches
- cars
- appliance repair
- carpentry
You need strict enough moderation that firefights and trolls are quashed immediately, and loose enough moderation that the occasional side-conversation or on-topic rant is allowed through. Proper threading and the ability to know what you've already seen and what is new: those are also necessary.
I feel that your optimism is unfounded. The specific kinds of fora you say are necessary, are a dying breed. They simply aren't as available to an internet user as before the rise of walled silos. Even where a forum is available or a user has the technical skills to put up his own forum, that forum is nothing without people other than yourself congregating there, and they have mainly left forever for the walled gardens.
There are people I know from mailing lists and newsgroups and fora who are my acquaintances, even though we've never met in meatspace. I have cried over their deaths and been happy at news of their joys.
There are people I remember from tens of years and thousands of miles away, whom I hear from more regularly because of social media networks. That's nice. It's low effort for me, it's low effort for them, and we all get more out of it than we put in.
If what you mean by the word "friend" is, someone who will answer your call in the middle of the night and bring over a shovel and a tarp -- I have only a few of those. Those relationships take more work, and are not fully sustained by social media, though they may be partially supported by it.