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Comment by tacostakohashi | Hacker News Reader

Yep... back then, the internet was a way people would discuss and organize their real world interests and activities, like clubs and usergroups would organize their next meeting... and then meet, off the internet.

Now, it's all just online drivel that never turns into anything else.

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I use the Internet about how I used to 30 years ago.

I chat with friends. Sometimes, I make a new friend or lose track of one. On rare occasion we get together to do whatever it is that we have a common interest in. That used to be IRC.

I learn new shit by interacting with people I don't know at all. Sometimes, that means hanging out in much more anonymous places (like HN) and sharing ideas. That used to be Usenet.

I learn other stuff by Googling things and otherwise conducting research. That used to be AltaVista; nowadays, it's often an LLM.

I order pizzas. (I just ordered pizzas, in fact.)

How 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?

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.

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.)

That's still not answering my question. Where do you make those "far away IRL friends"? Most commercial platforms today discourage (because it is bad for engagement) users from building close ties with individual other users even if said users are willing to let their guard down. The user base of open and easily findable non-commercial platforms has collapsed. Your posts are dangling some kind of 2026 Shangri-La before HN readers, and you can understand my skepticism.

Reddit. Discord. HN. (Definitely not Facebook. That whole thing is resolutely toxic.)

I do not care what the platform encourages or discourages. If others do care and this precludes friendship, then: So it is.

You have seriously made contacts on Reddit or HN that have led to meeting people IRL when you visit their regions or they visit yours? Even way back when IRL meetups between users of internet forums were common, Reddit was already famous for having a culture where that wasn't at all likely due to the design of the site.

As for HN, there is no DM feature and only a minority of users give any contact info in their profiles. In over a decade here, I have never seen one user passing contact info to another user in public.

Of course I have. I've flown and driven many thousands of miles to hang out with some of these folks. We've even planned and executed public events together. We help eachother out. When the distance is great and we want to borrow, lend, or trade some small stuff, we spend a few dollars and send it in the mail.

It'd be pretty great if we all lived closer, but we do not. We've all got our reasons to live wherever we individually live.

I've also made other, more-temporary friendships online in recent years. When they're nearby it's actually pretty easy, upon recognizing that things click well-enough, to go out for drinks with other friends, or sushi, or whatever. It isn't necessary to commit to keeping a friend forever in order to make these minor moves and put a face with their words and just hang out for a bit.

For HN in particular, there are ways to initiate out-of-band comms. It's not exactly rocket surgery to just drop an email address (a throwaway one? a real one? sure!) here in a comment, or leave a clue in a bio, or even to do both things to validate who's who and connect.

It works for me, and I'm somewhat private about what I share here. Meanwhile, some users here are very public about who they are and don't hide behind a pseudonym at all. It's OK. Both types fit.

There's nothing that would motivate me to lie about this stuff. I do not stand to gain or to lose anything whether you believe me or not. :)

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