I’m not sure how to word the title, but I was feeling nostalgic recently. I was playing a MMO back around in 2006 and met some online friends and they were fun to hangout and chat with. This was back during the MSN/AIM days. I was able to get in contact with some of them which was nice. We used to chat every so often on AIM/MSN, but eventually lost contact with each other around 2010 or so due to going to uni/life.
I was really never into social media platforms back then(still not), so I never asked for their Myspace/Facebook. I only really used messaging platforms such as AIM/MSN/Skype and now Discord. I do have a FB account but never added anyone, but only really used it for university housing.
Anyways, I felt quite nostalgic recently and I missed them and wanted to try to see how they were doing. MSN is dead, but outlook exists so I was able to get their full name from Outlook and their name was unique enough to filter their city(which matched where they were from when we talked) when I googled the name.
I tried emaling their MSN email, but no replies since no one really uses hotmail anymore. I was able to find their tumblr(which is deactivated). I couldn’t really find their Facebook since there’s multiple profiles with the same name and no profile pics. I found their twitter but no tweet and the only tweet was a hacked tweet(those scam ones). It was following 0 people and only had 1 follower. I was able to find some of their friends on Twitter since I searched for the username. There was also a facebook post that one of their irl friends mentioned them in. I also found their LinkedIn, but it seems inactive since it was last updated in 2020. I sent them a connection request, and it’s still pending.
Now I did try to contact some of their irl friends either on Facebook or Instagram(I don’t really use those platforms so I have no idea if it looks sus or not). The one friend I contacted on Facebook hasn’t responded. It even looks like they posted recently too. I dmed some of them on Instagram as well, but haven’t gotten any replies. Some of these Tumblr/Twitter posts were from 2012-2013 so not sure if they’re in contact anymore.
I did lose some hope, but I thought of something and decided to search some of their irl friends on venmo and was able to find them through it except it looks like they last used it in 2019. I could obviously try sending a penny to see if they get a notification for it, but probably not worth the effort. I looked and was able to find multiple payments between them and a irl friend. The irl friend seems to be pretty active on Instagram as well as having a public profile. Now I’m not sure how Instagram works, but I was thinking of sending them a DM asking about my friend, but that probably wouldn’t work since I haven’t gotten any replies from other irl friends. I could try sending a message if they post a story and asking them to check their DM. I’m not sure how weird or creepy that will be since I technically found them on Venmo, but I could just say I was able to find them through Google by searching my friend’s name and then explaining my situation.
Does anyone else have any other ideas or is this too weird to do? I could also do the penny method, but I don’t have high hopes since it looks inactive.