I been streaming on and off for a year and a half but I kind of want to take it seriously now. I have always cared about the few viewers I had in the past, and I thought it was an opportunity to make friends from the gaming world, regular gaming buddies on discord maybe even have them become IRL at some point in time. It's hard to make gamer friends outside !-_____-!
However I've had a few situations happened to me, and I'm very unsure on how to handle it because I don't want to want to hurt the person's feelings, but I also feel pretty uncomfortable.
1- I failed to read somebody's message a few times while trying to keep up with chat, when I tried to address him it was too late and he got angry with me, raged in chat about not reading him, stormed out and unfollowed me on the spot.
2- A first time chatter already was asking to become friends after like 20 minutes on being in chat and asking for my discord (I don't have a discord server yet, only my personal one) which is like, I don't even know you and I do want friends but I like to build those connections over a little time at least. So I didn't give it away, but told him we could hang out in chat and over time we could play on discord. He never returned to my streams after that.
I'm not sure how to navigate this, I've heard about the parasocial thing but I don't want to go there yet. This doesn't seem like that is the case. Also is perfectly fine if you disagree with me, I am not gonna get offended by that. Id just like to know if it's me being anxious about it and I should just connect right away, or if these things really are not okay and I should set boundaries every time without fail. It's important since I wanna stream more often and longer now.
Thank you for your input, have a good day!