Making Friends Online

Epistemic Status: This is a personal reflection of what “feels right” to me when building online communities. I have some initial feedback from my writing circle that it is fairly relatable to others.

Why I wrote this: Between remote work and tech products, everyone is talking about their community. What does it really mean to build community? I want to better understand this as a Founder, and as I prepare to join a team creating a new Cohort Based Course this year.

I didn’t believe in making friends online until this year. I had heard of Bumble BFF, and was curious about how the internet was changing our relationship to everything around us, but I figured I was too “old fashioned” to really connect with someone I had never met in person. This fall I not only learned that making friends online can feel even more natural than doing so in person, but I also felt like I got a little glimpse into the future of online communities and collaboration.

As teams big and small debate whether or not they will return to collaborating in offices it is important to understand vibrant, robust online communities. Write of Passage did a few things right in making it easy to make friends quickly, things that anyone looking to build a community online can learn from. 

Vulnerability

"We only get close by revealing things which would, in the wrong hands, be capable of inflicting appalling humiliation on us."

This quote from the School of Life sums it up.

It can take years or it can take minutes to get to this point with someone. If vulnerability is important in creating true friendships, building any community is at least partially about building the space and circumstances for people to be vulnerable around each other.

Write of Passage does this first by putting everyone in a situation where they are asking for help, and helping others. By sharing your writing, you are opening yourself up. When someone takes that piece of you, and responds in a supportive way, it creates a virtuous cycle where everyone is encouraged to be vulnerable and grow stronger together.

Light, regular contact

It can be really hard to coordinate schedules with your "IRL" friends. My book club in Nairobi only met every 2-3 months. 

Online friends easily have short and regular interactions: a response to a tweet, a comment on an article. It's like a giant whatsapp group but all about ideas. Through light and regular contact that is often coming through small group broadcasts instead of 1:1 conversations, I have a better idea of what my online friends are thinking about than those that I live in the same city as. 

The important thing here is that online communities can encourage frequent and easy interaction, which can actually be deep conversation if you follow each other down those rabbit holes of ideas. You are talking to your friends and followers, but also broadcasting to other future friends what you are all about. 

A shared goal

Only about a third of American workers are actively engaged in their work (source). Not everyone at university is there for the pure pursuit of knowledge. We have a lot of reasons why we might end up in online "communities." The WoP experience is effective at turning online communities into friendships because people have shared goals and have made a shared commitment (in this case, time + $$). DAOs are demonstrating how powerful online communities with shared goals can be. It can be easy to assume that everyone who shows up is there for the same reason, but setting purpose and creating alignment is really important - this goes for businesses, courses, or other communities.

Vulnerability, light but regular contact and shared goals and values are at least the start of a good recipe for building online friendships. How much more fun would zoom meetings and online conferences be if organizers thought about how to cultivate friendships amongst participants in their program design? I’m excited to be a part of this evolving space, and please get in touch with comments and ideas to add to this recipe.