So if long-distance friendships and relationships over the internet are not real, why are letters exchanged between people who seldom if ever met IRL so celebrated and collected in books and stuff?

Like are we going to decide correspondences between scholars, writers, artists and so on are no longer important if they took place on social media, texts, emails and so on? Such a shame our communications have plummeted in value since they became primarily electronic

(I do wonder on a practical note if electronic formats are going to affect archiving, disclosure and so on, because there might be technical difficulties, e.g. locked & encrypted devices, and psychological barriers to, say, turning over email or social media archives to researchers even if the survivors gain full control of the decedents' accounts. Maybe that's for the better, since certainly not all posthumous disclosures of this material has been consensual.)

A partial list of people who are gatekept and devalued when online spaces and interactions are called fake and unworthy, with heavy overlaps between the groups:

- Disabled people who cannot travel frequently/have difficulty leaving the house
- Poor people who can't afford frequent travel to attend conferences, meet distant friends etc.
- People who live outside major population centers where they can hold sizable and frequent offline gatherings with like-minded people
- Minorities, such as trans people and members of racial/ethnic groups, who have various difficulties gathering in numbers offline

Also consider that the problems derided as "online problems" only of concern to whose who are "too online" occur in offline spaces as well. Every group that develops its own culture and history will come to have hyper-specific concerns that are incomprehensible to people outside the group. These can be online-specific, like conflicts over federation on the fedi, but they occur offline as well e.g. within workplaces, religions, or local communities.

While online interactions might have less physical and social intensity and immediacy, this can actually be a valuable feature for those who have safety concerns, sensory or social overwhelm, and other reasons that make offline interactions and community unpleasant or even dangerous.

Like for all the moral panic about online dangers, there is still more risk in close physical contact. Most online safety concerns, in fact, revolve around physical spaces and contact, such as caution with physical location information, or precautions when meeting online contacts such as dating prospects offline.

Turn that around and it means online-only interactions are significantly safer, though they also lack some of the benefits of offline interactions. It's up to each person to weigh the risks against the benefits on a case-by-case basis, and it's not a flat metric of offline interactions always being better.

@ljwrites i think the biggest issue with online safety is scale — it used to be there were very few people in the country notable enough to have 200+ people sending them hatemail, now that can happen to literally any person who’s post happens to go viral in a bad way

@ljwrites but that doesnt actually make being online *more* dangerous necessarily, its just a different set of risks