This sounds like it was written in 2003. In 2022, in my experience, it's just as difficult to make friends online as it is anywhere else. No one here is my friend, for example. We just post in the same space. When I used to post on Reddit, which I did for years and years, no one there was my friend either. I check a few of those boxes but communities online are so bloated with hundreds, thousands of people, that it often doesn't feel like there's room for another weird, disabled, chronically ill, queer, and/or unusual person. The most you get - if you're lucky - is a positive reaction to something you post, maybe some commiseration that someone out there feels the same way, as you said. But then that interaction finishes, that person goes away.