Social feature: Ability to "friend" specific users!#136

I want to share my interests with my (actual, real life) friends. If I could add/follow them by user name (and have the ability to approve or reject incoming requests), friends and I could use Atlas Obscura to share places we like. My traveling buddies and I could share places we want to consider going.

Hi @GlitchSketch thanks for the suggestion. We love the idea of making it easier for people using Atlas Obscura to connect with each other and see each other across the site. Could you share more about how you’d use this and how you see it working?

For example, would being able to contribute to a shared list be a useful feature? Would you like to follow your friends and see their activity in a feed? Would you want more rich interactions like messaging?

I’d be interested in messaging. I recognize this opens the page to potential spamming and soliciting. Perhaps an option could given to a user the first time they receive a message if that’s a thing they want to participate in or not. And people can opt out of messaging as well, if it gets bothersome. Many times I have read a few articles all by the same person about locations in a locality and I think they might have some good insight into a visit. Or I might just wanna say “You’re writing is dope AF”

I love this idea. It could be something super simple to start off with such as just have friends listed under profiles.
An even simpler model to follow could be that of Duo Lingo, Last.fm, or Letterboxd where users can follow each other and each profile lists “followers” and “followed by”.
This way it’s easy to find users that otherwise don’t interact much with the community features already in place.

The next step can be to add some feed of where your frieds/followed people have been recently or where they want to visit. Maybe even if they have posted photos somehow. But at this point it might become more of a social media platform.

Another use-case can be to match “places you want to visit” between you and your friend. Or match your “want to visit” with their “have visited” list, to exchange info about the place for a planned trip.