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@ciggysmokebringer I hear you. It's sometimes rough counseling a friend through a bad breakup and a new relationship or whatever when you can't just show up at their house with a beer and a pizza for them to make sure they eat and take care of themselves or sit with them on the couch with your arm around them to make sure they don't feel alone. I wish I wasn't so picky so that it would be easier for me to find people that I can feel comfortable opening up to in the real world but honestly I feel more comfortable opening up about tough topics over text rather than in person anyway so...

I think another big difference between your experience and mine is that I actually don't take much part in any big online communities oriented around special interests or hobbies or games pretty much at all. Instead, I have a general presence in places like that and on social media like Mastodon and occasionally pick out specific people who seem especially compatible with me to reach out to you on a one-on-one basis and make friends over private messages on Discord or Signal. And then eventually once I trust them enough I introduce them to the group Discord server that I have for my closest friends (and then they start dating each other XP). So I really don't have that experience of some online community I was invested in shattering or being taken down or being overrun by toxic people or whatever because that's not really how I approach things. In fact I'm going to replace my close friend Discord server with a self-hosted open source clone of Discord pretty soon, I'm actually making contributions to their open source Android app specifically with an eye toward making the app useful by me and all of my friends. So that removes yet another layer of having to worry about things outside of our control making the relationships not work.