Well, I'm pretty new to Mudcat, at least as the message boards go. I've used the site to search/download Digital Tradition for quite a while. It took me quite a while to venture into the message boards, and then really only to search for more songs. But slowly, and more recently, I've begun to get a sense, at least from a lurker's view, of the Cafe's feel of community.

And it's a familiar feeling. I first got on the 'Net when I was hired to the job I stil have...*counts on fingers*...eight years later. One of the first things I stumbled onto was a telnet-based, text-only BBS that had made the transition from local dial-up board in Omaha to Internet BBS. My Mudcat handle is a tip o' th' hat to my original handle there. And I do know that I've made lasting, important friendships _there_. I work in computer networks, and attend a fair number of conferences and such in different areas, and three times in the last five years, I've been met/dropped off at the airport or otherwise met with friends from that BBS.

That BBS has since been driven underground by a couple of hacking 'Net psychopaths from its distant past, but it still exists in its secret corner where old friends, just a few of us now, still gather. Many of my closest friends from the BBS I've actually met in meatspace, and a few who've fallen away from the BBS I still stay in touch with. But that little cadre who still come around there includes a number of dear friends (some of whom call me "Uncle Shad") whom I've never met and probably never will due to geographic obstacles. Can't travel _everywhere_ you might want.

I hope I'll find the Cafe to be a similar place in terms of friendship and community. From what I've thus far seen, I think I will.

So, my short response to the original post: online friendships are a different kind of friendship from meatspace friendships, even when the two overlap. But I wouldn't trade away a single one of 'em. Lasting, meaningful bonds are formed in such places as this.

Chris