25 Fun Things to Do Online With Friends

Why activities beat conversation

Shared activity gives you something to react to, which means nobody has to carry the conversation on personality alone.

Think about your closest friends offline. You didn't become close by interviewing each other. You became close sitting next to each other doing something ordinary, with the talking happening around the edges of it. Online friendship works the same way; it just needs the activity to be chosen on purpose.

Music things

Taste is the fastest way to know somebody.

1. 1Build a shared playlist where you each add one song a day, no skipping allowed.
2. 2Swap your top five tracks of the month and rate each other's honestly.
3. 3Send one song with the instruction: "listen at 11pm with the lights off."
4. 4Do a genre swap week — you pick their listening, they pick yours.
5. 5Make a playlist that describes their personality and let them guess your reasoning.

Watch-along things

Same thing, same time, running commentary.

1. 1Pick a bad film on purpose and score it out of ten, category by category.
2. 2Watch one episode a night of a show neither of you has seen and predict the next one.
3. 3Do a reaction swap: they show you a clip they love, you show them yours, and neither is allowed to be polite.
4. 4Live-blog a match, a launch, an awards show or a finale in chat.

Game and drawing things

Free, browser-based and quick to learn beats anything that needs a download.

• Drawing guess games

  The classic. Being bad at drawing is the entire point and works better than being good.

• Word and letter games

  Daily puzzles you both do and compare scores on take thirty seconds and become a ritual.

• Co-op over competitive

  Games where you lose together build friendships faster than games where one of you wins.

• Story games

  Write alternating sentences of a ridiculous story. Ten lines in, it will be unrecognisable.

• Trivia rounds

  Set a theme each round — 2000s cartoons, geography, song intros.

Making things together

Slow projects are the strongest glue there is, because they give you a reason to come back.

1. 1Run a two-person art challenge: same prompt, one week, compare results.
2. 2Redesign each other's profile themes and see who understood the other better.
3. 3Write a chapter each of a story that gets progressively more unhinged.
4. 4Do a photo-a-day theme week — sky, shoes, breakfast, something orange, something old.
5. 5Learn the same skill in parallel and post weekly progress: a chord, a recipe, a language streak.
6. 6Build a shared list you both keep adding to — films to watch, songs, worst haircuts in history.

Things that work with a whole group

Groups need structure more than one-to-one chats do.

• A weekly theme night

  Same evening every week beats "let's do something sometime" forever.

• Tournaments

  Brackets, scores and a champion. Silly stakes make it better, not worse.

• Show and tell

  Everyone brings one thing they found this week and defends it for two minutes.

• Group challenges

  A shared streak — steps, drawings, pages read — where the group total is the score.

• Rotating DJ

  One person picks the queue each session and takes all the criticism.

Two rules that keep it fun

Ideas are easy. These two are what stops it getting weird or exhausting.

• Keep it on-platform and public-ish

  Group activities in group spaces are more fun and easier to leave than one-to-one pressure. If someone insists you move somewhere private and unmoderated, that's about them, not the activity.

• You're allowed to skip a night

  Online friendships get heavy when they turn into attendance. Missing a week should cost nothing.