Each fall, TMU’s dedicated Reddit group floods with students looking for friendship. But are they really finding companionship on an anonymous platform?
By Sorousheh Salman
FOR ISHIKA GUPTA, December 2025 was as dark a winter as ever. The chilly nights were made even frostier when she lost a friendship she’d spent years pouring energy into. She had other friends, but the fallout left her grieving. The emotions of having lost someone close pushed her to begin finding a meaningful connection elsewhere.
Her search culminated on Reddit, more specifically, the Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) subreddit, r/TorontoMetU. There, she came across a series of posts made by TMU students who, like her, were looking for friends online.
Behind the anonymity of Reddit’s alien mascot Snoo, Gupta made a post of her own looking for a new friend. The act of searching for a companion, in what is
often described as the internet’s pits of hell, yielded all kinds of results, from vulgar requests to ghosting. But perhaps most surprisingly, her callout succeeded in finding new friend.
TMU HAS A diverse student population, two-thirds of whom commute to campus from the far reaches of the Greater Toronto Area and beyond. For many, this makes it hard to build connections solely through everyday campus life. Though, trouble finding friendship in university is far from a TMU-specific predicament. According to a 2023 study in the Journal of American College Health, around 31 per cent of Canadian post-secondary students reported experiencing loneliness.
Forming friendships can involve uncertainty. Ryan Persram, an assistant professor in TMU’s Department of Psychology says in a face-to-face world, when young people are sharing an environment such as school, the uncertainty around making a friend can come from fear the friendship could fall apart and leave long-lasting implications.
As online social interaction became more common during the COVID-19 pandemic, platforms like Reddit have only grown in popularity as places for students to find companionship. Reddit, an online platform built around smaller communities known as subreddits, was launched in 2005 by former college roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. The site is now a space where users can connect based on interests and shared experiences. It didn’t take long for students at many post-secondary institutions to create their own dedicated subreddits, with students at TMU jumping on the university subreddit bandwagon in 2008.
Now, as new semesters begin each fall, first-year students (or those just looking for companionship) flock to r/TorontoMetU, to make their own variation of a “DM if you want to be friends” post.
Unlike a dating app, Reddit was designed for discussion—so there’s not always a straightforward path to finding friends on the site. Gupta, a 2026 graduate in applied math with a specialization in computer science, said connecting with students on Reddit was difficult.
When she created her post on r/TorontoMetU, she clearly specified she was looking for platonic female friends, more specifically, to find “a friendship that genuinely feels like home.”
“I’m not looking for someone to text for a week and then disappear,” her post read. “I want the kind of friend where we actually choose each other. Someone who’ll randomly ask if I’ve eaten, send me a meme at 2 a.m., drag me to try a new café, go on random walks, dance in the kitchen, celebrate birthdays properly, take silly pictures, hype each other up before interviews, cry together when life gets hard, and still be around years later.”
Even then, over a dozen online users sent her vulgar messages—a direct rejection of the boundaries she’d tried to set. “That was bad, like a horrible experience,” she says. But among the range of undesirable responses, there were some people who reached out earnestly, too. And after exchanging a series of messages behind their Snoos, arranging an in-person
meeting was a significant next step for Gupta. Three months ago, she met her online friend and they decided to attend a movie night hosted in The Chrysalis, TMU’s on-campus theatre.
Being in-person allowed Gupta to develop trust and a connection with her—they shared personal stories of coming from India and their transition to studying abroad.
“I’m not looking for someone to text for a week and then disappear. I want the kind of friend where we actually choose each other.”
Persram says face-to-face interactions allow people to learn more about one another in ways that technology-based communication doesn’t. “Physical proximity is not necessarily a requirement, but it does help,” he says. Persram says the value of nonverbal interactions and cues is developing a deeper understanding of another person. On Reddit, people don’t see someone’s body language or how they interact with their environment—and this may prevent them from understanding certain aspects of an individual’s personality and behaviour.
TMU student Matthew Serban says he finds the disembodiment makes online friendships feel distant.
Like Gupta, Serban found himself scrolling through r/TorontoMetU, and among the first posts he’d seen was someone asking to make friends. Feeling outgoing, Serban joined the conversation. But in his experience so far, he hasn’t found interactions with these kinds of posts successful. When he sends Redditors direct messages, they either take days to reply, or respond in as few words as possible.
“I didn’t know their enthusiasm compared to an in-person interaction because I never saw their facial reaction, their verbal tone, how excited or how enthusiastic they were,” Serban says.
The fifth-year marketing student said not having access to a profile picture on Reddit—or a name that wasn’t a string of random numbers and letters—challenged his ability to connect with people.
To make friends online, he prefers Instagram, where he can see a user’s face, or at the very least, could ask for their real name.
IT’S NO SECRET TMU is a commuter campus. In 2020, a university-led poll found that 77 per cent of students take public transit to school. And until 2030, when a new residence will double the number of residence beds, there are a meagre 1,144 beds for around 48,000 undergraduate students—a ratio far lower than most Canadian universities. That, and Toronto’s ever-rising cost of living, can make it less desirable to spend excessive time in the city.
Serban ranked the difficulty of finding a community on campus an “eight out of 10,” thanks to his hour-long commute.
With this, platforms like Reddit are the seemingly logical, yet illogical place to make friends. Persram says the internet has removed all physical boundaries—and made making friends more accessible, in a sense. Instead of having to coordinate class schedules to find an opening to meet a friend on campus, students can now carry friends around in their pocket. Instead of spending a lecture alone, they can text away on a Reddit tab with professors being none the wiser.
THE FIRST TIME Gupta hopped on the internet to make friends was before university. She was taking a computer science class online in India in 2021, at the height of the pandemic, just before she was set to jet across the world for school.
As she prepared to leave for Canada, Gupta joined the International Student Support group on Facebook, where she began talking to other students who were preparing for a similar transition. There, she found someone to connect with.
Though she was residing in Delhi and her friend in Punjab—seperated by a several-hour car ride—the two international students eventually took a leap of faith in their friendship by booking a flight together from India to Canada.
Gupta, an introvert at the time, says, “It was really interesting; [my friend] wouldn’t stop sharing her stories from the past.” When the pair made it to Toronto, they kept their friendship alive, living closer to each other for some time and resorting to call or text to console each other through school-induced melancholy, especially on Toronto’s cold winter nights.
Transitioning from high school to university can be drastic for some students, says Persram. “It’s almost a similar jump that you make from going into high school from elementary school. You’re changing schools, you’re changing your entire environment,” he says.
For Phoebe Cox, a fourth-year English student at TMU, the way she finds new people to connect with as a university student changed over the course of her four years. “You get busier and busier and busier,” she says. “The friends that you used to hang out with all the time sometimes are too busy to do that now.” Facing this challenge, Cox ended up searching for new friends on Reddit. She joined r/TorontoMetU to learn more about her courses, but when she found a post from another student looking to make friends, she reached out. The student never replied to her. Other attempts also proved fruitless. Cox couldn’t get over how short the responses were or how abbreviations like ‘wyd’ seemed to make their exchanges so impersonal.
Cox started conversations with three users, but never met any. One user asked her “Wanna be besties?” flat-out, without expressing interest in getting to know who she is. “Calm down. You’re a random on Reddit,” she thought to herself. “Besties is a bit much.” The chat request is still sitting unanswered in her Reddit inbox: “Hell no, I’m not doing that.”
Cox then connected with another student who had replied to the Reddit post. She was a year older than Cox but studied a creative degree similar to hers. She felt an immediate sense of familiarity. Their conversation initially stayed on Reddit before moving to Discord, where Cox began to feel more comfortable—now they knew each other’s names.
This new online connection reminded Cox of friends she already knew. “I’ve seen this personality before; it always ends well for me,” she says.
FOR GUPTA, in the journey from country to country, she found her online friendship had paid off. And after arriving in Toronto, it didn’t have to stay online, and that allowed for the friendship to grow.
Similarly, Serban says, in-person interaction felt easier when there was a natural reason to approach someone. Last March, his professor had called for a break in the lecture when he decided to approach someone in class to talk about a group project.
“It’s more natural, because you don’t have to have a starting point of speaking,” Serban says. “On Reddit, you have to ask a question, you don’t get to tell someone’s body language.” He and the classmate ended up being in the same group project and continue to talk to this day.
For Cox, online friendships aren’t simply an alternative to an in-person connection; it opens the door to meeting a range of people, even internationally.
“My best friend,” she explains, “is an internet friend from the UK and she’s flown over to meet me a couple of times now.” She admitted to feeling ‘jittery’ and nervous when they began speaking virtually, thinking, ‘Will this person like me?’ but eventually they clicked and it felt like hanging out with any other friend.
Being able to talk about her interests online felt easier for Cox. “If I want to be a complete nerd about a certain show I watched, and I’m already friends with someone in that fandom, I know I have a safe space to do it. If I want to be a nerd in person, I gotta test the waters.”
“Calling it a friendship is accurate, whether it’s online or in person.”
This phenomenon of feeling less judged online is explained by Sukhjeet Sidhu, a qualifying registered psychotherapist who works with youth in Toronto. “If I’m behind a screen, my entire self is not attached to this username; it’s just my words. It’s not my face, my personality or my history. It’s not really me.”
Once Cox feels comfortable with an online friend, she’s ready to bring the relationship into the physical world. One of her longtime internet friends, whom she met through a fandom community on Instagram as a teenager, also ended up attending TMU. She described their first in-person interaction as strange but not uncomfortable.
“It was like, ‘Oh, you’re actually real,” she says, “‘You’re standing in front of me. And you’re actually a person that I can talk to, not online.’”
A lot of people will go and visit their online friends in person, explains Sidhu, “It doesn’t stay as a username. It stays as a person. So calling it a friendship is accurate, whether it’s online or in person.”
SCROLLING BACK SEVERAL years through r/TorontoMetU’s history, dozens upon dozens of TMU (and when it was r/Ryerson, then Ryerson) students have asked to make friends on one of the internet’s most ridiculed platforms.
“Transferring unis and kinda nervy to make friends,” one of the most recent callouts says, to Redditors encouraging in-person interactions. “A little bit about me, I enjoy drawing, going on nature walks, gaming, and reading. If you are interested in studying and/or hanging out with me, please send me a DM,” a fourth-year accounting student posted, to zero replies and six upvotes. “Please dm me ion really care who dms me or who you are I JUSY WANNA FIND PEOPLR WITH THE SAME INTERESTS AS ME,” another user wrote.
“Lmao,” was the one-word reply of another Snoo-hidden person.
As much as some students will find success in building friendships on Reddit, the platform will always have its drawbacks; for Cox, it’ll be a resounding “hell no” to whether she’d share her real name over the app. And without a real name, the question might be how legitimate the friendship really is.
But Persram and Sidhu drive home that friendship—be it in-person, or online on the internet’s pits of hell—is often valid in providing company and comfort amid a loneliness crisis. No one will stop the brave TMU students from trying to find company.
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