There’s an interesting dynamic you have to deal with when you try to carve out your own little space online. You’ll learn that there’s a line you have to cross before you can connect with other people on a social (human) level.
You cross that line when you prove your humanity (or perhaps, your value or your worth) to others and to the larger conversation.
Because human beings can be risk-averse and the sheer number of people who act irrationally online suggests that the chances are good that a stranger you meet online will be irrational and bizarrely out of touch with their own humanity. So, most of us are understandably on guard online, as we should be.
That means you have to prove your worth first before you can hope to engage in authentic and vulnerable connection with other people. In other words, you have to trust your tiny olive branch won’t get slapped right out of your extended, but shaking, hand. It makes sense why you’d be timid. You’d have to have thick skin and a reserve of bravery to confidently extend your olive branch into the unknown.
But if you do, the real humans will respond in kind. The irrational ones won’t, but you wouldn’t have conversations with them in real life either, would you?