Meeting Twitter Friends IRL

One year ago, I joined a group of people creating businesses online. The group, Creator Coop, loosely formed on Twitter through people sharing a similar set of challenges and opportunities. The group’s leader, Jonathan Hillis, formalized the group for us and started organizing a weekly call for us to catch up. Each week, we get together for an hour to talk about what we’ve been working on. We also share and promote each other’s work on Twitter. But up until last week, I hadn’t met any of these people in real life.

What is it like to meet someone in person who you’ve only ever interacted with on Twitter and Zoom? Honestly, it feels totally normal.

When we did all gather, I was like a reunion of old friends. We got together in the Texas Hill Country for a week of working together. We explored the Hill Country and stayed up late talking about our shared interests.

Twitter is all about the ideas you share. Because we’re all apart of the same corner of Twitter, we had a lot of shared context that we could pick up in person. Every conversation went deep down one rabbit hole or another. I feel like my brain grew in size this week, just from sitting around the fire pit, at the dinner table, or in the stock-tank pool and talking with a group of people who circle the same set of ideas online.

The experience gave a lot of credence to the idea that communities can form online before meeting in-person. By starting online, you can easily organize around a set of values and ideas, then pick the best place and time to meet in-person as a group.

If remote is the future (which I think it is), then this will become a lot more common: remote work, remote communities — remote everything.