in favor of using ONLY MESSAGING SERVICES, public messaging services, sorta like discord if i want to make friends, because i realized that making friends is already hard enough and therefore it’s harder to make friends in social media!! mostly because of the complicated ui!! dang it!! but yea if i were to ditch everything and instead use messaging services, PUBLIC messaging services like discord or even matrix, i think i would make friends more easily, that would make me very ok, plus i could show off more stuff that i’ve been working on like programming and get feedback and stuff, woa!! anyway what do you think please??
A few problems of chat only:
None of these are show stoppers, and there are benefits to limiting your digital presence.
That all being said: Real friendships tend to require a lot of work and most people can only usually put the work in for a handful. In general, keeping in touch with those you want in that handful is best as follows: real world in-person > 1:1 synchronous video/virtual world/chat > group chat platforms (discord, etc) > letters > emails > blogs > microblogs.
Outside of those few, its good to still get out and do social networking regardless of the technology. For people I want to collaborate, collaboration platforms (Codeberg, etc) and messaging can work great if in-person doesn’t work for whatever reason (typically time & distance). For interesting online acquaintances, filtered blog/microblog feeds seem to get the best time/benefit ratio.
It’s also really good to do event based networking, such as hackathons, board game nights/bars, and community service. Letting people find you has its benefits too, I recommend looking into the IndieWeb on how to best do that if you want to be found.