I’ve kept my real life separate from “my Internet life” for more than a decade now.

On sites that I have both groups of people friended from, people that I know in real life tend not to want to interact with people that I know from the Internet at all and some have even gone so far as to express varying degrees of discomfort doing so. I try to be as respectful as I can, especially in situations like that, so of the only social networking page where I have both friended — Facebook, at least as of right now — I have filters so that no one accidentally “runs into each other”. (The one exception I made to this was decades ago when I actually pursued a long-distance relationship, with everyone indicating that they liked the person after I took the time doing what I thought was getting to know him — this is the one who I had to turn in multiple members of his family (himself included) to law enforcement after… finding certain things out, as I was left absolutely no choice. This floored everyone that knew, or had known, about him, and they alleged that they “had no idea” that he or his family could have been like this. But from that point on I became a lot more judicious about separating real-life friends from “friends on the Internet”, and then I drew a firm line.)

I’m hoping that if I can ever move somewhere that is more tolerant in general that I won’t have to do this.

But back when I hadn’t completely separated the two groups, I could tell that any time I brought up a friend from the Internet (“friend from the Internet”) it was regarded as less than… or in some cases, not even at all.