The 'make friends on the internet' age as it was back then is probably largely over outside of select niches, but I still find fulfilment in commenting and discussing matters within more niche topics. Within those, it's still fairly likely that I'm not actually talking to a bot, and that they're not a complete knobhead who isn't discussing in good faith. Hacker News gets there sometimes, but it can still spill over into the bad discussions that have now flooded mainstream social media.

I've always treated comments as about me first and about other people second. If I can't defend my point of view from some online random then I haven't really thought it through. Online discussions are still quite good at ripping bad arguments apart, even if there's rather more vapid noise around than there used to be.

There's still avenues for connections - I am making "friends" as we speak on reddit with like minded people (specifically politics, people who are sitting roughly in the same point in the spectrum as me)

I've noticed that the demise of twitter has impacted my ability to connect with like minded people - I gave up on mastodon because the ability to stumble upon other people with similar tastes wasn't nearly what I wanted it to be.

Here (HN) I have mostly found wonks and trolls replying directly to me, but I do see a lot of interesting discourse (which is what I'm looking for... right) which will likely lead to connections (eventually)