On keeping up with friends and contacts

During August Jedda wrote about making friends as an adult, which sparked a lot of conversations from many bloggers who shared their thoughts on the matter. Blaugust was in full swing, so there was a lot of interactions and perspectives shared—just look at all the Community Echoes!

Lately I’ve seen more conversations popping up, this time about how to manage friendships as an adult.

First it was Stephen, who linked to a reddit post from someone using Obsidian for this.

I assume this is not new. Be it analog or digial, from post-its to calendars to Notion to Zettelkasten and other the like, keeping up with acquaintances is something everyone who is social tries to do, one way or another.

The latest post from Gobino. about Unhinged—a friendship tracker and reminder app—was the trigger that got me to provide my two cents on the matter.

As an aside. One of the most important things I do is add their info to my contacts app.

A lot of people may not be aware of this, but the contacts app on your phone can get you a long way in the journey of friendship management. It is already integral to your phone, and it lets you add more than just the name and phone number. I like to include addresses, emails, websites, birthdays—which will sync to the phone calendar by default—and a note, where I usually add how we met or how we interact the most. Last but not least, a contact picture; be it a selfie, a videogame character, or an avocado, something that I immediatly relate to the person in question! A lot of these contact fields are hidden in some stock apps, so fiddle around in the contact info screen to see if you can expand it, or use a privacy respecting alternative with a more practical layout. I recommend Fossify Contacts if you use Android.

It should be noted, I do not use a Google account to store this information. I sync the info via CardDAV/CalDAV¹ instead using the DAVx5 app. I rely on my email provider’s DAV integration for this. I used to have a self-hosted solution in the past, and there are many available, like Baikal and Radicale.

You can also stick the local storage on your phone to keep this information and, just do regular manual backups. I must recommend Fossify Contacts again, because its backups are the only ones that keep the full resolution of the contact picture. Every other app including the native one will downscale the images to 150x150 px or something terrible like that.

Okay, enough technical mumbo jumbo.

To start things off, I think it’s important to differentiate between the friends I know in person, and those that I’ve only interacted with via a username, and email or a phone number.

In real life

When it comes to the real world, I must admit I don’t consistently keep up with more than 4 or 5 friends, besides family and the co-workers I interact with day after day. I am an introvert after all, I don’t really talk with anybody in real life very often.

There’s really nobody from my school days anymore, I could reach out to them at any time and chat maybe, but actually going for a coffee or something I haven’t actually tried.

I remember a lot of people by name and I have their contact information, so I get notifications for their birthdays, and I’ve sent messages sometimes to congratulate them, which sometimes sparks short chats where we catch up. At one point, I even got in touch with a friend who I convinced to buy a Miyoo Mini Plus, and we played together for an hour or so—it’s been a year since then.

When it comes to my co-workers, I mostly keep it professional. I have gone to the Christmas parties, and I have had no issues with any of them, I regularly talk about videogames with one, but honestly if I were to leave I don’t really think I’d keep in touch with anyone. Even though I am extremely grateful for the teammates who’ve taught me so much, and the experiences I’ve gone through, I’d move on to what’s next.

It’s really just friends at church that I talk to regularly. I’ve been blessed by friendships that I can count on at anytime over the years.

Even when I’ve moved to different cities, I’ve always been able to catch up whenever I visit one place or another, it’s delightful. I have a friend I made when I was 7 or 8, who I hadn’t seen in more than 15 years, I visited on a whim more than a year ago, he let me stay at his place and we talked for hours about things I’ve rarely talked with anyone else. Friends like that are hard to come by.

On the web

Quite a bit of my social interactions nowadays are, for better or worse, online. For the better, mostly, thankfully.

I’ve found many great people on plenty of sites and networks, from a casual comments section on a blogpost, or constant exchanges in online spaces such as the Fediverse or Discord.

I have had the pleasure of chatting on multiple platforms as well, from XMPP to Matrix and my favorite, Signal. Some of those conversations have been ongoing for 3 or 4 years now, and many of those people are wonderful individuals who I just can’t believe I’ve stumbled upon on this space known as the web.

And of course, there’s something awesome about a slow but constant email exchange that just can’t be quite rivaled, I don’t get tired of them.

I even have the privilege of receiving a couple of physical letters from online friends I trust and care about deeply, although I haven’t actually made the effort to write a reply. Now that I am into Fountain Pens though, I think there’s no better time to get on with it.

The internet is such a scattered place, it has been around for so long, so many old accounts and dead online chatrooms, abandoned servers, shutdown online games (RIP Club Penguin). And, despite it all—at least since this blog started—I’ve managed to meet some wonderful people out there, who are no longer just a profile picture or just a bunch of text and pretty graphics on a screen.

Sometimes it’s easy to dismiss someone online on a first impression, in reality, everyone is a fully three-dimensional person with feelings and experiences, differences and similarities. And somewhere in the process the internet turns us into ones and zeroes, and we may think that’s all there is to it. It takes an effort to get past the digital and get to the analog when the internet is in between, but I think it’s possible, and usually worth it.

So, yeah, online friendships vary a lot depending on the situation. Be it instant messaging or just a random comment on each other’s posts from time to time, I don’t really have to plan out anything here, except for time to respond to the longer email conversations I might have going on.

Final thoughts

Honestly, in either case, I don’t really go out of my way to worry a lot about when or how is best to interact with someone. I think that, despite my introverted demeanor at first, this usually vanishes as soon as a sense of trust is gained. Even if we stop chatting for a bit, I’ll probably just randomly pop-up and say anything for no real reason other than wanting to know what’s up with you.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s bothersome, but I know I’m never bothered by someone contacting me, so I just think the odds are on my side that the same is true for most people out there.

In any case, I feel like this post went to a lot of places and it’s pretty decently sized already, so, I hope it’s good enough.

Friendships are quite awesome, and so are you!