Are you unable to make friends online?

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I have never been able to make friends by trying. (Not sure anyone has!)

When I have made friends, it's been over a long period by being in the same group for some independent reason. Work and college are the obvious examples. But the same happens in small online communities (or a small active core in larger groups, if I think about it). And it takes a long time (I said that already, didn't I) and it happens when you aren't thinking about it.

What I'm really bad at is keeping friends. I'm hardly in touch with any friends from college, and very few from previous jobs. (Facebook is just the illusion of continued contact!)

I have made temporary online friends, lasting between a few weeks to over a year. I am never entirely open with these people. Online 'friendship' means nothing more to me than having somewhere to share thoughts I can't share in real life. If I made a real friend, I wouldn't miss my online 'friends'.

To me it's the other way around. I'm (almost) unable to make offline friends, but here on the Internet is where all my friends are.

I find it much easier to make friends online than in real life, because I'm not socially phobic online. Generally, this happens when I participate in a forum I'm interested in. It's kind of hard to cement the friendship though, in the sense that when the forum is over, the friendship tends to die. Whereas in real life, I have a small circle of friends and we tend to stay friends forever. Many of them I've come to realize are BAP and they tend to have personalities similar to my own. More recently, I've made friends with a couple of young Aspies online -- they mean a lot to me. I'm not usually good at empathy, but with them, well, even I can sense that they're like me, and I identify with their gifts and their pain and hope desperately that they'll have an easier time than I did.

I don't really have any real life friends but I have a few online. One of them I talk to every day so I'd consider him to be quite a close friend.

I quickly developed a knack for interacting on forums which I started right after I turned 13.

But I have never ventured beyond that, like skype and instagram. Just forum PM and not much of that even.

There is only one person from a forum that I have been pen pal type friends with for about a couple of years and we also play Lord of the Rings Online together.

In real life there was a neighbor kid that was friends with me. And had a short time friendship with a PDD kid I met at summer camp. In both cases it was them being a friend to me and the guy online too. I do not know how to make friends and tend more to want to keep separate from others.