About making friends through fandom

[alasse_irena]

I know a lot of people, both here and on Tumblr (and in other spheres, I guess), who have made close friends through online fandom.

I am interested, for Reasons, in hearing something about how you made these friendships, or, if you've never made a close friendship online, if you have any thoughts about why not? (Whether that's why you didn't seek them out in the first place, or why they never really clicked for you.)

I am very interested in online social processes. Come talk in my comments about how you make friends!

Comments

[primeideal]

-Once on an RP site I was in an IRC (predecessor to discord) chat frequently with a lot of the other users. Our RPs were sports themed so we would mention our favorite teams, which sometimes indicated where in the world we were, and then would branch off to have side conversations about musicals and stuff. I met a couple good friends in there through private chats and wound up trying to meet them when I was in the area.

-On another board game site a lot of us played games together asynchronously over forums, then in real-time on voice chat. That was a site that skewed older so we were more inclined to use real names, and then some of them would meet up at large board game conventions. Later they/we set up smaller game conventions just for this online group so eventually I travelled to meet some of them.

[alasse_irena]

Don't worry, I'm plenty old enough to remember IRC! =P

[ayebydan]

Each time the friendship has come down to both parties talking about their personal lives. I'm a pretty .....idk, caring/open/trying person? So often I will send a pm if I see a person in crises and just listen. So many friendships have been built that way. PMs, lead to Emails, Emails lead to phone numbers ect. I tend to find that fandom based journals or ones not updated often don't tend to cultivate the same sort of relationships.

[alasse_irena]

There's definitely a sort of aspect with journalling where you start to feel that you know people you've followed for a while, even if you don't talk or interact much, because you have kind of...passively shared a bunch of experiences with them. I can see why solely fandom journals don't have the same effect. Although I guess being a fandom journal gives someone interested in chatting to you an easy in, because it's a very obvious common interest...

[genarti]

I think every time someone has gone from "internet acquaintance I feel quite friendly towards" to "actual close friend," it's been through repeated real-time conversation. By this I mean either chat (AIM, IRC, slack, whatever; I haven't really gotten into any discords but potentially that too) or RL conversation (at a con, via local friend overlap, via "hey I'm gonna be traveling through your city, any chance of couch space," whatever. Thought that last tends to come after chat-friendship has already occurred to some degree.)

[melannen]

Yeah, I'd agree - while I certainly feel strongly about my DW friends (and would be happy to turn any of them into close friends) the only time I've had online friends I'd feel confident thinking of as close friends was a) when I was really active in a realtime chat) or b) when I was seeing them in RL meetup fairly often. (I'm not a phone person, so "share phone numbers" doesn't work.)

Which kind of sucks, because DW-style conversation is definitely what works best for me, but somehow it does always seem detached in a way realtime chat doesn't.

[genarti]

Yeah! I think because there's something more intimate about ongoing, repeated free-flowing conversation, in a way that even the most freeform comment thread hasn't matched (for me personally)? There's time to toss the conversation back and forth and talk about whatever seems worth talking about. It's true for me of other social media forms too -- tumblr, twitter, etc. I've made friends that I met through tumblr, but not ON tumblr, if that distinction makes sense. I'm likelier to feel closer to people I know only through DW (or LJ before it) than I am for people I know only through tumblr or twitter, because the interface and conversation style works much better for me, and maybe to consider them a potential close friend, but I'm still probably not going to make the transition to considering them a real close friend until we've chatted at some length in one medium or another.

(Not phone, though, agreed. I'm not a phone person either. The list of people I'm willing to chat with by phone, rather than do brief business with, is a very short and honored one.)

[alasse_irena]

Yeah, the exchanging of IM handles of some kind seems...key, to me at least.

The idea of having a friendly chat over the phone with someone who isn't...my mother or my sister pretty much, is distressing.

[tei]

The closest friend I've made in fandom is lovetincture, which was a process of the sort I had stopped believing was actually possible. Basically we were both fairly new to a megafandom, I commented on her fic, she commented on my fic, she added me on twitter, I added her on tumblr-- then the tumblr pornpocalypse happened, which had the effect of suddenly making it a lot more normal to reach out to people asking what other social media they have and inviting them to new places. So in fairly short order I managed to convince her to join Dreamwidth, come onto the IRC channel I had just started frequenting, and get whatsapp so we could text internationally.

So I guess I'd have to echo genarti that the key is repeated real-time conversation. I do remember having some good friends on an old php message board where we were all on around the same time every night-- unfortunately we were all young enough not to realize that things on the internet are not generally immortal, so didn't exchange any other sort of information and it ended when the preteen maintaining the thing got bored of it.

Right now most of the people I'd say I know in fandom are either from IRC or on Twitter. As much as I don't like twitter as a social force, it is way better from my perspective at least than tumblr, fannishly-- that aspect of repeated real-time interaction is way more present, both in terms of conversations branching off of tweets and also that a lot of fannish activity takes place in private message group chats.

[forestofglory]

Some offline friends where asking me this and I wasn't really sure.

My closest online friends are the people in my private slack group and I'm still not sure quite how I ended up getting invited. It involved being friendly on DW for years, then on twitter, then happening to go to the same con as a friend of friend who told the friend at the con to say hello to me. So just persistence and dumb luck I guess.

But as other people have said real time convos and lot of continued contact seems to be pretty important for forming friendship. Which I guess is true offline too -- that's why a lot of people struggle to make in person friends as adults.

[alasse_irena]

Yeah, dumb luck, continuing to exist, and sometimes being caught up in the right fandom at the right time, seem to have been the magic ingredients for me,

You are right though, it bears all the same difficulties as any friendship we're you're not forced into spending a bunch of time together by outside circumstances (eg work/school).

[adrianners]

I don't think I've ever become close to anyone in the "make them my Fannish Next of Kin on AO3" sense, but I've definitely gotten to the level of sharing full names and cities/addresses with people over the years. I agree with many of the above comments that a major factor was communicating outside of a group setting, such as going from a forum to AIM, Tumblr posts to direct messages.

A couple other things I've noticed:

- Since I started being active on AO3, every close friend I've made has been through comments there. They commented on my stuff, I commented on theirs, and then we started talking privately on another platform.

- From there, we usually became closer by talking shop and participating in the fannish gift economy. I've beta'd fic, co-hosted a podcast, been gifted somebody's spare merch, etc. I'm not great at the maintenance of online friendships, especially in early stages, so having responsibilities toward each other kept us in contact where I otherwise might have started forgetting to respond to messages. Like forestofglory said, I think this is the general struggle of building friendships as adults, not just online. If we're not stuck together in school or work, it's hard to stay in touch.

- I was talking recently about wanting to join Discord servers as a way to make more friends in post-Tumblr fandom, but reflecting on my own experiences and seeing the comments above, I'm starting to think that isn't necessary. Or rather, the image I have in my head is "join server, make 20 friends," but what's more likely to happen is "join server, make one friend, start talking to friend mostly outside server, quit/ignore server."

[alasse_irena]

I'm so interested in the people who have told me they've made friends through AO3 comments. A)3 has always felt like such an impersonal experience to me. Like, nothing wrong with it, it's a well-organised and easy-to-navigate fic archive, but I have never imagined it as a space to meet people.

You are very much right - I have been imagining it as a different process to irl friendmaking, but in actual fact it is probably the same process, but just interacts with timezones differently.

(My discord experiences have been like, "join server, make friends with the two people who are in my timezone, because everyone else is sleeping at Peak Alasse Wants To Message Time", but I feel like this might be less of a thing when you're not in that GMT+8 to GMT+10 zone.)

[used_songs]

I've made exchange-names-and-addresses friends on LJ and DW both, I suppose because of the level of conversation/interaction, especially when a comment thread gets good and there's a lot of back and forth. A few times that has progressed to g-chat (back in the day), texting, and real time back and forth on twitter. I had the opportunity to meet one online friend once but I was ambivalent and she must've been too, so we didn't meet up even though I was in her city. She has, however, hung out with my sister who lives in that city, too.

To be honest, it's rare that I'm going to want to introduce my online life to my offline one. I'm not very gregarious irl and I prefer the asynchronous nature of online relationships.

In the early 90s, before I was online and when I was involved with friendship books, I became penpals with a fellow music fan with whom I shared a lot of the same taste in music, we visited each other's homes, and then we started dating and she moved to Texas to live with me ... for a while. We split up and she moved away but we still talk on FB.

[alasse_irena]

You can definitely still have close online friends without ever hanging out with them in physical space!

[tigerweave]

It's either just time spent interacting with people, which adds up over long enough, that they become friends, or for some reason the friendship online moving to offline.

For me anyway. Also I tend to try to prioritise friendships with Aussies or Kiwis because one day I'd love to meet them all! And I don't have the health to go o/s so Aust or NZ it is. (NZ isn't o/s, since I lived there so it doesn't count!)

Yeah... but like irl, there has to be enough time and space and ... like both people turning up to the mutual contact zone and interacting, for a friendship to grow enough to take it offline.

Interesting question!