Making friends online - advice needed

It used to be possible in the 90s and 00s. I'm not sure it is anymore. I remember one of my best online friends was made through another webforum. But this one allowed you to put your AIM details on your profile. This particular girl and me always ended up in the same threads having interesting discussions so one day I just messaged her on AIM. Some friends I made through friends. I'd have people say 'oh I've just been speaking to X on msn, you'd probably get on with them, let me introduce you.' then add us both to a group chat. Something similar applied to facebook although normally you wanted at least one face to face meeting before adding people there.

Online dating used to be good for making online friends. Because you'd make flirty connections with people which often didn't pan out romantically but you made a friend. This was in the days pre-tinder when you could message basically anyone who's profile you liked the look of and if you bombarded someone with boring / offensive messages they'd just block you. It promotes a model of interaction that incentivises you to be interesting.

Alas society has changed and the idea of putting your contact details online or passing out a friends contact details, or even a dating service that allows unsolicited messaging is a huge no no for most people these days.

It used to be possible in the 90s and 00s. I'm not sure it is anymore. I remember one of my best online friends was made through another webforum. But this one allowed you to put your AIM details on your profile. This particular girl and me always ended up in the same threads having interesting discussions so one day I just messaged her on AIM. Some friends I made through friends. I'd have people say 'oh I've just been speaking to X on msn, you'd probably get on with them, let me introduce you.' then add us both to a group chat. Something similar applied to facebook although normally you wanted at least one face to face meeting before adding people there.

Online dating used to be good for making online friends. Because you'd make flirty connections with people which often didn't pan out romantically but you made a friend. This was in the days pre-tinder when you could message basically anyone who's profile you liked the look of and if you bombarded someone with boring / offensive messages they'd just block you. It promotes a model of interaction that incentivises you to be interesting.

Alas society has changed and the idea of putting your contact details online or passing out a friends contact details, or even a dating service that allows unsolicited messaging is a huge no no for most people these days.

Facebook used to be really good for making friends IRL. For starters by default you could see if people shared a common activity with you. By which I mean they were on the same course at the same university.

people would post events with a more the merrier attitude. House parties, nights out, a trip to the cinema. And even if you weren’t invited if a friend was going you could usually see the event and ask if it was ok to tag along.

now Facebook hides almost everything by default because privacy. 

you see I realised the act of actively trying to make friends is basically indistinguishable from most normies definition of stalking. You are by definition actively collecting information about people on the fringes of your social circle who are not yet your friends and attempting to engineer greater contact with them.

the normy mindset these days is so paranoid that the way they think about stalking now overlaps with the process of trying to actively make friends. (And heaven knows for most of us autistic people making friends isn’t ‘just happening naturally’)