I don't understand

Human communication is actually very complex and only about 7-10% of it is verbal. I think we only call people “friends “ on the internet because it’s a relatively new phenomenon and we don’t have a word for it yet that wouldn’t offend someone

I can reach alot of them off of here.

i was on a different site a while back, and when one of my friends there died suddenly, his brother logged into his account to let everyone know what happened. it was part of his last wishes, written down, that his brother was fulfilling. he said he felt awkward doing it, but that it had actually given him some solace. he got to read through all of his brother's posts and meet some of his long-time online friends. but you're right, most of the time no one knows what's really happened when someone disappears, and even this site can just disappear. the site i was on, where that happened, died June, 2015.

Maybe because of their boundaries :v
If peeps wanna keep it strictly in the SW zone, I respect ir

That happens in person too though. One of my jobs, I deal with elderly people. They try to keep tabs on each other because no one else is going to. After a certain amount of time, your friends just die off and no one can tell you whatever became of them. Or sometimes they don't die off; they go to live somewhere else, like with family. But family doesn't know their friends and doesn't inform them. Seems like a normal thing for people to just fall out of one's life out of the blue like that. Even the young.

I have contact information for a number of my friends but that doesn't guarantee anything. Online friendships are weird, they don't seem as durable or sincere as in life friendships..
One friend left and ghosted me after a few text messages and stopped responding to emails.
I thought we were close 😔

That certainly happens. That's why you hook up with them on some type of IM

Bizarre