I don’t really use social media at all. I do have accounts on instagram and Facebook but only use them to occasionally post my art but never any personal posts, while most of the people i know are borderline addicted to sharing every moment of their life online.
But I’ve been thinking lately that maybe i should be doing more of that. I think it would be easier to talk to people online and then I’d be more comfortable talking to them face to face.
But on the other hand… I feel a bit weird to start posting personal posts suddenly when everyone knows me as someone who doesn’t really do that. I generally have a hard time doing something out of what people expect from me.
This is a bit of a ramble. Anyone have a similar experience/thought process? How do you make friends??
I think it honestly depends on you and your goals. From conversations around the internet in general I have a theory that there are two main ways to use social media.
There’s user-based, where you’re interested in people and the random goings on in their lives.
Then there’s topic-based, where you don’t really mind who you’re talking to as long as it’s about a mutual interest.
As someone who has basically always stuck to topic-based, places like Instagram actually used to be great and I’ve made some genuinely good friends there. My account was based around a topic, I browsed related hashtags and found other accounts about that topic, and naturally you get to talking with the people you’re seeing again and again in the feed for that topic.
Of course, nowadays that’s gone from places like IG in favour of seemingly random influencer suggestions and video spam everywhere, so I’ve moved to Mastodon which I’m using in the exact same way. Using and following hashtags, chatting to others doing the same, generally showing an interest.
It sounds like you’re similar to me in that you want to share your art but not necessarily a ton of other personal details. This is totally a viable way to use social media! But to take it from that to making actual friends, you need to do the social part of the social media too. Post in your own unique voice. Find other people in your topic, talk to them like real people, be enthusiastic about the things they share, most of them will end up just being vague internet acquaintances but very occasionally one of them will turn into a real friend and it’s so much fun!
I guess what I’m saying here is that it’s easy and natural to make friends when you start from a point of shared interest. If you’re literally just posting about random things in your day and following people who do the same, there’s not that shared basis for a connection.
Ymmv.