How to Make Friends Online

Discover our tried, tested, and authentic ways to make yourself some new BFFs on your platform of choice! Find people, start talking, and befriend anyone today!

You’ve decided on your website or platform (or maybe a few) and have already gone through the trouble of sign-ups and verifications. But now that you’re ready to start, you’ve realized that actually making friends means you still need to reach out. And that can be pretty terrifying for most people, no matter how confident they feel behind a screen name.

Making friends online isn’t all that different from making friends in real life. You still need to find people who share your interests, you still need to reach out to those people yourself, and that kind of interaction can be genuinely stressful, especially if you’re not already the best at human contact in general.

But there’s no need to be afraid, since making friends online is also meaningfully different from doing it in person, in ways that mostly work in your favor. We’ll share what we think works best to get people’s attention, ways to start conversations, and ways to keep them going once they’ve started. We’ll also cover a few things to keep in mind that might lessen the stress of having to put yourself out there.

Find a way to introduce yourself

On many message boards or social networks, there’s usually a dedicated place to introduce yourself to the community. This is incredibly common on forum sites like Reddit and other bulletin boards, but plenty of social networks have groups built specifically for this kind of thing too, if you go looking for them.

If you’re hoping to make friends with people in your country, city, state, or region specifically, searching for a local group or page can also turn up great results, letting you meet all kinds of people around you that you never even knew existed.

Once you find a place to post and introduce yourself, try to write in a way that feels natural to you rather than copying a template. Say a few things about yourself — maybe your age and a rough sense of your location, like your country or region. Share some interesting facts, like what languages you speak or whether you have any pets, and wrap it up with your interests and hobbies. Sports, music, and movies are all fantastic, reliable ways to find people who like the same things you do, and there’s a real chance someone will reach out first if they see something they recognize in your post.

Interact with people and posts

Introducing yourself might drum up some initial interest, but the majority of users will probably skim right past your post without engaging much further. To make yourself known in a community, it’s important to be genuinely engaging and interested in others, not just focused on being noticed yourself. Keep interacting with people consistently, and people will start to remember your name. If they like you and your contributions, they’ll be more likely to reach out to you on their own.

Find posts about what people are doing, reviews, opinions, anything really, and look for natural ways to interact with them. Commenting is especially effective since it’s public — everyone in the thread can see what you say, which means you’ll reach far more people than a private message ever could. But creating your own posts and threads matters too, since that’s often what gives you the visibility you need to be found in the first place.

Find people like you

These people don’t need to be exactly like you in every way, but after you’ve been active in a community for a while, you’ll start to naturally remember names, usernames, and generally what different people are like or interested in. Once you notice that pattern, you’ll be able to single out people who share your specific interests, and that’s when you can start actually reaching out.

Most communities, platforms, networks, and websites have some option to message people directly, whether through email or a built-in messaging feature. From there, you can start an actual conversation with that specific person, and finally make yourself some real friends instead of just passively lurking.

Start a conversation

This is where the real magic happens. It’s also the part where a lot of people freeze up and lose their nerve entirely.

Talking to someone new can be genuinely intimidating, and if you’ve ever tried to make friends in real life, you already know exactly what we mean. Finding a way to open a conversation that isn’t too cringy, keeping it going naturally, and making sure you don’t come across as too nervous are all real hurdles.

The good news is that it’s considerably easier online. We’ll get into why in a later section, but for now, let’s focus on actually getting a conversation started.

Depending on your shared interests, you may find different natural ways to open up. If you both like basketball, ask if they caught last night’s game between teams you follow. If your new contact likes music, ask what genres they’re into, or what album or song is their current favorite. Or ask about movies, TV, books, or whatever other media you both seem to enjoy.

This is usually the easiest way to open a conversation with someone who shares your interests, which is exactly why finding someone similar to you in that sense matters so much early on. You can absolutely try to make friends with someone whose interests don’t overlap with yours at all, but it’ll take more work to find common ground, and the early conversations might feel a bit flatter since neither of you has an obvious topic to fall back on.

Keeping the conversation going

Constant engagement might feel a little strange at first, but once you start talking to someone regularly, you’ll eventually get close enough to genuinely call each other friends, or at the very least, solid acquaintances. Stay up to date on shared interests — if you both watch the same sport, try to catch the game whenever you can. If you don’t follow it as closely, you can always ask your new friend whether anything interesting happened during the last match.

Don’t wait around forever for someone to message you first, but also try not to seem too desperate for conversation either. If you’re always the one initiating, it can start to feel a little lopsided or needy over time. It’s fine to wait and see whether someone reaches out on their own sometimes. If they don’t, they may just not be that interested right now, and as hard as it is to hear, it’s often better to move on and find someone else to talk to rather than forcing something one-sided.

Try not to take it too personally either way. Sometimes people come back around after going quiet for a while — they were probably just busy with their own lives and didn’t have the time or headspace to message back right away.

Keep it interesting

After a while, talking about the same handful of topics can start to feel stale, so it’s worth getting a little adventurous. If your friend likes music, try exploring new genres together, or send them something a bit more original to react to. If they’re into drawing, encourage them to share a portfolio, or ask them to draw something ridiculous just for fun. Anything goes here, but sticking to the exact same conversational loop tends to get dull after the fifth or sixth time around, so it helps to mix things up occasionally.

As your topics evolve, your opinions on things will probably start to diverge in small, interesting ways too. Have some good-natured banter, argue playfully about your different takes, but keep the overall tone light-hearted. That’s usually a sign your friendship is evolving into something a bit more steady, and it makes chatting with each other noticeably more interesting over time.

Getting comfortable

Like we mentioned, actually talking to new people can feel like a genuinely daunting task for a bunch of reasons, but it does get exponentially easier the more you do it. So here are a few things to help you relax and remember why making friends online tends to be easier than doing it in person.

For one, when you’re talking online, you don’t have to worry about stuttering. When you meet someone new in person, you might get nervous, stumble over a simple sentence, and then the whole interaction turns awkward from there. Or you freeze up and don’t know what to say next, and suddenly there’s a long, uncomfortable silence hanging in the air.

Online, neither of those problems really exist in the same way.

When you’re typing, there’s no stuttering to worry about, and you can always reread your message before sending it to make sure it doesn’t sound strange. And when you genuinely don’t know what to say next, you can just take a beat and reply once you’ve figured it out. If it takes you a little while, you can always mention you stepped away to grab a glass of water or that your pet demanded attention. It’s much less pressure than it might sound like on paper.

Finding people to talk to is also considerably easier online. Say you’re out somewhere and you spot someone who seems interesting — if you work up the courage to say something and it turns out you don’t actually have anything in common, that can get awkward fast, in front of other people, in real time.

This is exactly why finding people online works so well by comparison: you can get a general sense of what someone’s like and what they’re into before you ever say a word to them. Just read through their posts, comments, or the kinds of things they tend to reply to. Watching from a distance for a bit gives you a much clearer picture before you take the leap.

As you get more comfortable with someone, talking to them gets easier too — conversations start to flow naturally, or you’ll just send each other a funny picture out of nowhere every now and then. So don’t worry if you’re not instant best friends after one conversation. It always takes time, exactly like meeting someone new at school or at work.

Know when a friendship is actually forming

It’s worth learning to recognize the small signs that a connection is turning into something real, rather than assuming it either has to be obvious or it isn’t happening at all. Do they message you first sometimes, unprompted? Do they remember small details you mentioned in passing weeks ago? Do they check in when you’ve been quiet for a while? These small signals matter more than any single big, dramatic conversation, and noticing them helps you figure out where you actually stand without needing to ask directly.

It’s also fine for some online friendships to stay light and casual forever, never quite turning into a deep bond, and that’s a perfectly valid outcome too. Not every connection needs to become your next best friend to have been worth making.

Don’t treat every conversation as a test

It’s easy to overthink every message, replaying your last reply and wondering if it came across the right way. Try not to treat every interaction like a performance you need to get exactly right. Most people are far more forgiving than you expect, and a slightly awkward message rarely torpedoes a budding friendship the way it feels like it might in the moment. Letting go of that pressure tends to make you more relaxed and genuine, which people naturally respond to better anyway.

Recognize when you’ve made a real friend

Somewhere along the way, an online acquaintance quietly turns into an actual friend, and it’s worth noticing when that shift happens. You might catch yourself sharing something you wouldn’t tell just anyone, or genuinely looking forward to their messages instead of just responding out of habit. There’s no official milestone for this transition, but recognizing it helps you appreciate the friendship for what it’s become, rather than still treating it like the tentative, early-stage conversation it started out as.

Conclusion

These are fantastic tips to get you started with making friends and starting conversations, but as you put them into practice more and more, you’ll figure out what works specifically for you too. It all comes down to experience, a bit of practice, and honestly, just what kind of person you are.

Our approach here is what works for us, and generally works for most people, but your platform of choice might not have the exact communities you’re looking for. If you want a shorter, punchier list to start with, our 9 quick tips to make friends fast are worth a look too. In that case, you can always start one yourself and find similar people who share the same interest, rather than waiting for the perfect existing group to appear.

Always be sure to stay safe online when meeting new people, but remember to keep an open mind and stay friendly. The rest tends to follow from there.