Wasn't sure if you meant making friends on social media or just in general but it seems like you meant on social media. This is gonna my response for social media.
So making friends for me in general is pretty hard due to having social anxiety, but on social media I think it's been way harder. I find it hard to have conversations with new people without panicking. Sometimes even with my old online freinds and IRL friends.
Replying to threads like this is usually okay, since there is no pressure, and always time to change your mind or delete the reply, but if someone wanted to have a live conversation with me like right now there's a high chance that I would go blank and/or panic and either force myself to reply or just flee and go offline.
If I do force myself to talk to people then usually I end up wasting energy on panicking, worrying about offending them, worrying about making mistakes or other nonsense instead of actually just talking and connecting with them which sucks. If I flee, I feel bad because I abandon them. Luckily I've been doing better with this but I could do better.
I also think things like cancel culture and cringe culture have also kinda fueled this anxiety since I was a little bit better with talking to people online when I was younger. I think I still had anxiety but not as bad so I believe that is one way social media has kinda screwed people with anxiety like me. Honestly, maybe just people in general.
It's hard to make freinds when you feel nervous just being yourself.
Some people have also mentioned luck, which I also agree with. It's hard to find people you mesh with already, but if you don't use some of the more popular social medias like Twitter or Tiktok for example, that's lowering the chances of meeting new people. Since I'm trying to avoid those two, I guess that's lowering my odds.
All of this is excruciating because I believe having friends would be wonderful, and seeing freinds together both irl and online makes me sad and maybe even a little jelly, So due to reasons both mentioned here and not mentioned here, I would say it is definitely hard for me make freinds online. >_>
So that's a little chunk of my experience with freinds on social media/online. Sorry for the whole ass essay, I wanted talk about more like trolls and not fitting in, but this is already extremely long. Even cut some stuff but it's still pretty looooooooooooooooooong. If anyone reads this, wow! Thank you for reading this monstrosity <3 and to Ren best wishes on the blog. I will definitely check it out when it's published.
So before I end this, huge shoutout to Firefox for crashing, causing the erasure of the beginning of this post. Luckily I had a screenshot backup so I took it wrote the rest in my notes app. If you write long stuff on here do it in notes, lesson learnedย xD.
Edit: Why'd I write so much holy moly.