In my opinion, the answer has always been to participate in group activities that cover something you're interested in, as it gives an easy starting point to begin a friendship. For me, it is either games or certain coding niches.

As a non-user of Twitter, I don't think its organization is conducive to easily finding friends - instead of focused individual communities, I believe it is more free-form (?) as a result of "the algorithm" determining your interests. Which could be considered a plus because of discovery as noted in the article.

I do see how you could extrapolate similar interests from other users based on their tweets or replies and bootstrap a friendship from that as the author mentions (kind of risky when dealing with anonymized opinions about controversial topics or just straight up lies), but it seems like much more work compared to participating in a group which you know already shares that interest.

To summarize, finding friends on Twitter is kind of like shooting in the dark.

However I initially missed the main point of the post because it was stuck towards the bottom after the list.

> translat(ing) these (online connections) into offline connections.

So now my question is why do you need to make your online connections offline? I have good friendships that are ongoing for years with people that I've only met online and have never felt the need to meet them offline. Note that I don't consider setting up an irl meeting online then meeting them irl as "making friends on the internet" unless I have been regularly interacting for a while already in somewhat private circumstances (like daily casual talk or playing games together).