It was so wonderful to meet you and Cadell, I'm glad the border patrol saw the sincerity in your plea for passage. I'm trying to think if I had ever had a friend that I'd not met in person prior to Hubski, and I definitely had. There is a french musician named Augus that I met on myspace. We have kept in touch with one another ever since. He's released music and had a child at parallel times with me. It's been nice to keep in touch with him. But what about prior to the internet? I don't think I ever had such a relationship prior to being "online."

I met a girl at springbreak in Myrtle Beach when I was 17 that I wrote for several years, but I had certainly met her "in the flesh" as they say.

I was talking with insomniasexx about how I am closer with many hubskiers than I am my friends IRL. Hubski friends know what I've been up to. They know that I'm working on podcasts, posting new songs, what I think about the latest political story of the moment etc. My friends don't get to see as far in to me as you all do.

I have some friends that are on Hubski and as a result I feel closer to them IRL than I would otherwise. A while back theadvancedapes posted about this phenomenon. (Cadell can you provide a link?) I also mentioned in our Michigan Radio Interview that as the lines between IRL and online are constantly being blurred, places like Hubski are all the more important.

I feel very fulfilled by some of the friendships I've made here. I'd count yours and Cadell's chief among them. Thanks again for driving so far, it was a great evening!

ElGuapo is by far one of my best friends. We've met twice now but originally hadn't met. Then spent 1 really drunk and drugged up night together. I definitely didn't formulate a true friendship with him the first time I met him IRL. But I can safely call him one of my best friends ever and absolutely love him.

It all stemmed from a chatroom we were part of. That community was large (and even larger now) but the regulars all became exceptionally close. I know more about those people than I ever did my real life friends. I know their struggles and issues and desires and all sorts of things that you would never have the courage to reveal IRL.

There is something about the internet that makes you spill everything. I remember one girl revealing a family secret to us before dealing with it IRL. I think chatrooms are the best format for this insane cross between anonymity and relationships. You say things over time and don't really think the same people are listening every time. You know it isn't saved somewhere for google to index or some bored person to find and read later along with your other comments. You say whatever and it's pretty much gone in about 5 minutes. As you hang out longer and longer you realize you know everything about these people.

The first people I told that I was dropping out of school was the chat. The "mom" of the chat immediately got my ass on skype and made me talk about everything. It was talking about it to a room full people I barely knew that made me realize how unhappy I was in my current situation and flesh out my thoughts, feelings and desires before really choosing to deal with it IRL.

I've met most of the regulars from the chat thanks to a glorious trip around the US on Jetblue's 30 day pass. But only for a day or two and usually with an excessive amount of alcohol in our systems. I don't think that those meetups changed or developed our relationships, we were already close friends before that.

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Zygar and I were actually also talking about online friendships and chatrooms last night and he mentioned that this is a bit of a disappearing as a trend as we move away from screennames and towards consistent identities (verified, twitter, facebook, etc.) When you know you are being watched or tracked you are less likely to reveal anything about yourself or have conversations about your innermost thoughts.

He forsees a dystopian future where you can glance at somebody and instantly know all of their deepest darkest secrets..."casually anonymised and aggregated into a list of traits." I pointed out that will eliminate that amazing part of falling in love or developing a friendship where you don't know much about that person and are learning and talking more and more every day. That pure, unadulterated joy of not seeing their flaws or weaknesses and just loving every moment you get to talk or see them. We're definitely becoming close friends fast. The amount of random things that we talk about every day confuses and astounds me.

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I see the same relationships forming here on Hubski. I recognize names and associate them with things that they have shared and who they are. Threads about people's creative creations and photoessay posts really reveal a lot and make me feel like I know that person. Posts that come to mind are BLOB_CASTLE's dumpster diving and kleinbl00's Area 51 and AnSionnachRua's recent Mayo walk. I also get to live vicariously through these posts which I love and I think really strengthens how I feel about other users. I won't even talk about thenewgreen because I could go on for another 20 minutes. I've been here for a while now and I know what most of the regulars here do for a living, what their passions are, what they want most in life and what they aren't satisfied with, what generally interests them, and what they want to "be when they grow up" etc. That's saying a lot considering I don't know half that about some of my closest IRL friends.

Maybe it's a result of being bi-cultural, but friendship is something I've been thinking about since I can remember. Growing up, I think I was aware of how friendships could exist across vast spaces in ways that I don't know that my peers were, as most of my parents' close friends came from very far away to visit. I also saw that their friendships with people from their home country were different from the people they called friends here in the States, something which I found confusing, having little experience with the different kinds of friendship that can arise over a lifetime and through different cultural contexts. I also thought that it was a bit sad that my parents had few close friends close by. For a while, I only considered people who I was close with in my immediate are to be friends, but over time that has certainly changed.

That said, proximity certainly has an effect on how people interact with each other, if only in the frequency with which they interact. Since I moved back from living abroad, I've spent much more time maintaining the friendships I do have, that I consider to be quality friendships as when I moved abroad in the first place, I noticed that I lost touch with some good friends from Boston. When I hang out with friends from Boston now, it feels easy to get back into but when I leave, that sense of closeness fades pretty quickly and not much effort is made on either side to be involved with each other's lives until one of us informs the other that we will be in the area in which one of us lives. That may be a quality of the people I'm friends with in Boston, who by and large have not traveled much and don't have a large number of friends outside their immediate geographic region. Also, New England isn't exactly noted for its warm interpersonal interactions, so I think it may be cultural as well.

I know that as time goes on, it's normal for people to have at least some friends that are not in the same geographic area, especially now that many people go to university far from where they grew up. Most of my very close friends are scattered around the world and in fact, I don't really have anyone I would consider a friend in my immediate geographic region, though I am often introduced to people I meet in social situations as "X's friend" or "a friend from high school" or whatever.

I don't know how other people think of or qualify friendship, if they do qualify friendship at all. At this point in my life, I think that friendship is dependent on the quality of the interactions as well as how much we can depend on each other. For example, I don't talk much with the guy I consider my best friend and to be honest, he's a pretty unreliable dude in many circumstances, but when I've been in a bind he's always done his damndest to come through for me and I've tried to do the same for him.

To answer your question, I would have to say that given my limited experience and the fact that I've lost touch with my own anonymous friends from the ICQ days a decade or more ago, right now the person I feel the closest to that I've never met would have to be thenewgreen as he is my pen pal. I enjoy corresponding with him and I think that we might be friends in real life, though to what degree I couldn't really guess at.

I like interacting with a lot of the people on hubski too and I think it would be interesting to get to know some of them, but I do wonder about how the reality of a person contrasts with how they are in real life. That said, I do value the interactions on hubski for what they are. For example, I appreciate that you take time to answer my questions and allow me to bounce ideas off of your experience. I certainly hope that we could be friends in real life :)

Lots. I've been involved in a bunch of internet communities, and made a number of good friends I never met or at least didn't for some time.

I was active on a Nintendo fan forum many years ago; there I met a girl and a guy, in that order, with whom I fell in love at different times. I was much younger then. I met the girl, with some other friends from there, back in 2010. I never met the guy, though we did recently get back in touch. I'm Facebook friends with a bunch of the Nintendo forumgoers - though the forum very quickly stopped having anything to do with Nintendo, and was just about us - but we rarely speak.

I used to play Team Fortress 2 back in the day, and made friends with the people on a particular server. One became a very close friend of mine, an English guy called Alex. He was about three years younger than I (a lot, at that point). But I haven't played TF2 in a while.

I was active on an asexuality forum as well (though I'm not asexual myself). I ended up getting quite close to a small group of members, and we met back in July of 2012 when I went to WorldPride in London. I was very close to one in particular; Sori, a teeny Asian girl from Alberta. But she killed herself in January.

And then, of course, there's Hubski. Unfortunately I've yet to meet anyone from here, due to that pesky Atlantic Ocean...

Like I said, lil, I have thoughts, but I don't know what they are. I'll try. What's for sure is that an online community I joined in early 2006 definitively changed my life, and even though I've never yet physically met any of the members I've been interacting with for years (mostly because they live in Australia), I would jump at the chance to.

In some areas they 100 percent know more about me than even my closest childhood friends (and of course vice versa) -- it's like what thenewgreen said above: I interact with the internet much more often and more conveniently than I do with friends who live all over the country. That's the key. For instance, none of my childhood friends know that I'm going to stack a bunch of fucking bricks in a pile this weekend and call it a bookshelf, but thenewgreen does. Etc.

The sad downside is that it's very easy to lose touch with internet friends, and it's often a very vague process. One of the core members of our IRC channel killed himself a few years ago and another went to jail for nine months -- but others just gradually stopped logging in. In a way this makes the whole process even more bittersweet; I'm reasonably sure I'll still know a fair number of my childhood friends when I'm 40, but I can't really see myself still frequenting internet chat rooms. Who knows. Times are changing.

So I guess what I ended up talking about, lil, was the odd dichotomy between becoming extremely close with online friends, but having very tenuous links to them, and knowing that at any moment they might disappear. In our friendships we have to trade intimacy for security? Not always, certainly, but the lack or presence of longterm ties in large part contributes to what we say to each other.