Going out on the town and hanging out, in-person with your friends is fun. So too is partaking in activities that you and they enjoy, like hiking and going to theme parks.
However, meeting up in person with your friends isn't always possible. Sometimes you are separated by distance, sometimes the world locks down during a global pandemic.
In any case, the good news is that there are a tons of fun things to do with friends online; things you and your pals can enjoy together no matter where in the world each of you are. All you need is an internet connection.
So let's take a look 25 fun things you can with your friends on the Internet:
25 Fun Things to Do with Friends Online
1. Explore a foreign city via Google Street View.
Google Street View is a pretty fascinating and free web feature that most people don't take advantage of enough of. From the comfort of your own room, you can enter just about any neighborhood in any city in any country in the world with just a few taps of your mouse. You can even go inside an impressive amount of buildings, including The Smithsonian American Art Museum in DC and the Flavian Amphitheater in Rome. Get your friends on video chat, grab a bottle of wine, and enjoy the virtual exploration.
2. Make some memes.
What are you and your friends interested in? What do you laugh about? Why not share that interest and laughter by making some relevant dank memes? Use makeameme.org or imgflip.com/memegenerator to either use beloved favorites or upload your own images, add some funny text, and bam share your memes with your friends and see if they go viral. Also, don't feel like things have to be funny. Thought-provoking and relevant memes are also really popular.
3. Join a writing community.
Writing is a really wonderful habit and hobby that anyone, yes anyone can partake in. And there really has never been a better time than now to partake in it. That's because there is an incredible amount of writing communities that anyone can join, including you and your friends.
Check out reddit.com/r/writingprompts if you enjoy fiction writing but don't know where to start or consider your friend groups' favorite television show or book series and find the online fan fiction community for it. Then, start writing stories. You and your friends already know the characters, so all you have left is to create the stories. You can even try writing scenes together as a sort of play.
4. Explore new recipes.
Love food? The internet is a verifiable cornucopia of recipes; quite literally there are billions of different culinary takes. Use discord or another streaming site to cue up your friends' video streams and arrange it so that you can all make the same recipe at the same time. You can either follow a new YouTube tutorial or you might even share turns and teach each other your own favorites. Consider, you all get access to your own kitchen, your own favorite appliances, and you get to eat all the delicious results yourself (or with your family).
Resources: Creative Cooking: Simple Sauces | Kitchen Confidence | Think Like a Chef
5. Sing together via internet karaoke.
The word karaoke is derived from two Japanese words. The first is karappo which means empty and the second is oke which means orchestra. A nifty combo that is even niftier when you take to singing to your friends across the internet void.
As you might expect, there are a ton of great downloadable apps that you and your friends can use. Smule, for example, is one fantastic app that is easy to use and includes many of the best hits from today and yesterday. Some apps also will have singing competitions for those who want to take it up a notch. In either case, singing is a fantastic hobby to practice, both with and without friends.
Resource: Singorama
6. Serve up virtual cuisines.
Don't want to break out the real pots and pans? Check out the VR game Cook-Out: A Sandwich Tale. This nifty game can be played via an online connection and involves an adventurous group of hungry forest creatures. You and your friends will work cooperatively together to host the best fantasy kitchen that will keep the guests “happy instead of angry.”
7. Do some low-bid auctioning.
Now don't go crazy with this one and set limits for yourself and your friends; but so long as you institute those limits, you can have a lot of fun with this. You can try a penny auction website like QuiBids for some potentially huge wins and really low costs, or go with the more famed name of ebay.com.
Make a small game of it to see who can get what product for less. You might even try flipping products, making a game out of who can get the biggest bids for a certain type of product.
8. Draw together online.
Drawing is another fantastic habit and becoming a better artist is a good goal for anyone to have. Drawing and painting help people see the world in a different way, it challenges you and taps into your creative side. With online co-drawing sites, such as Aggie.io, SketchTogether, and draw.chat, you can share this activity or hobby with your friends. And there are a lot of ways to share it.
There are online drawing sites that are focused more on basic doodles, others that invite more technical ability, and still others that use drawing as part of games, such as Pictionary-style sites.
Resource: Ultimate Drawing Course Beginner to Advanced | Character Illustration: Drawing Faces, Figures & Clothing
9. Get ordained for future events.
Don't really believe in hyper-religious events but do believe in your friends? Take a couple of online hours and have you and your friends undergo ordaining. The number one reason people get ordained is in order to perform a wedding for a loved one, but it isn't the only reason.
Becoming ordained enables you to officiate at other events and provide chaplain work in healthcare and prison facilities. If you're looking for a way to get more involved in the community and your spirituality, this is a great path to go
10. Get mischievous with Among Us.
This is another fantastic remote play that you and your friends can enjoy no matter where each of you is in the world. Well, you will need, of course, to be connected to the internet. But once connected, simply download the game (it is free), choose your avatar, and enter the room.
In this game, you and your friends will be moving about a spaceship while completing various tasks, but there is a deadly catch. One player in the group is the “Imposter” whose task is eliminating the other players. The other players' primary job is to stay alive long enough to vote out the Imposter and finish their tasks. It's a pretty addictive game with even some major celebs getting in on the fun.
Resources: Download Among Us on Steam, Google Play, or Apple
11. Watch a live concert online.
The pandemic was downright awful, no excuses, we wish it never happened. That said, there were some silver linings due to coronavirus-related measures and ways in which the world will now be operating. Live concerts are one such thing. Where before virtual concerts were almost unheard of, now many top artists and bands are looking to continue streaming their live performances online. So if you wish you could see that exciting show in London with your best pals, now you can. While still enjoying the comfort of your own home. Check big-name sites like billboard.com for upcoming events.
12. Discover new music together.
This one is sort of related to the above, but not fully. If you and your friends are tired of listening to your existing bands, then why not spend an afternoon checking out new bands? Each of you can go down your own rabbit holes of new potential favorites, sharing the clips you find and getting each other's opinions on the new favorite finds.
13. Stream a television show online together.
Watching television together while being apart is actually an activity as old as time. Just consider that iconic romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally, in which two single “friends” chatted on the telephone while they watched the even more iconic Casablanca at the same time but in their respective homes. Today, you can do the same but with online video chat, and you aren't beholden to cable TV schedules.
14. Browse Craigslist's Missed Connections and Best Ofs.
Looking for some laughs and some interesting conversations? Go to Craigslist. Craigslist may be a dying website nowadays, but it certainly isn't dead. This precursor to Reddit is a local-oriented website where you can find plenty of funny, corny, and straight-up ridiculous testimonials and call-outs to keep your friends and yourself entertained.
15. Help the world's coral reef by playing a game.
If you have ever felt frustrated by the state of the world, you aren't alone. It is a depressing fact that climate change is happening and pollution is a problem, both of which are leading to the world changing in front of us. The good news is that as bad as humans are, we also have the power to do incredible good in an incredible variety of ways. This Apple game is one such way. Check it out and have you and your friends take part in saving the world's coral reefs.
16. Create some music.
We mentioned above some other great ways of experiencing music online with friends — listening, finding, and singing your favorite tunes via karaoke software — but what about creating your own? With your friends of course! Just like the other music-oriented fun things to do with friends online, there are a lot of options here.
Soundtrap is probably the best one to get started with, however, thanks to its user-intuitive interface and boasting one of the largest collections of integrated beats, loops, and instrumental sounds.
Resource: Ableton Live I: The First Steps of Digital Music Production
17. Complete online multiplayer quizzes and guess trivia.
Learning more about your friends is a great way to bond with your friends. Playing trivia with your friends is likewise a great way to learn more about what your friends are interested in and things they enjoy engaging in. So why not spend some time enjoying things to do with friends online? You will find plenty of online quizzes and trivia websites all over the internet, but you might start with those offered via Facebook if you're at a loss.
18. Become each other's workout buddy
Making fitness a habit is one of the best things you can do for your health and overall wellbeing. Exercise and general fitness has been consistently linked to longer lifespans and greater happiness. The frustrating thing is that developing this good habit can be hard. One way to make it easier is to team up with a buddy. Thus, one fun and productive thing to do with your friends online is to partner up, use online videos and tracking tools, and get fit together. Check out this story for some inspiration.
Resource #1: Yoga Burn, which provides a natural way to lose weight and build a fun exercise habit at the same time.
Resource #2: Grokker has a wide-range of classes about Yoga (Read the review here).
19. Take a course together.
Okay, sure, some might not see enrolling in courses as fun, but really that depends on the person and the course. What are you and your closest friend most interested in? It can be ridiculous. Don't be afraid of the ridiculous. Say what you both love the most and start looking for online courses that involve it. For example, maybe you really enjoy video games and want to create your own with a friend, so why not take a course in video game design?
Resources: Masterclass | Skillshare | Udemy | Coursera
20. Start up a Dungeons & Dragons virtual campaign.
Dungeons & Dragons used to be unequivocally a “nerd” or “geek” game that was relegated to the dark basements. But no longer! Dungeons and Dragons is a role-playing game that is undergoing a verifiable renaissance thanks to its surge in pop culture a la hit shows like Stranger Things and the ease of which it can be played virtually. At its core, D&D is about storytelling. You and your friends create characters and with those characters you together tell a story about vanquishing the enemies and becoming heroes. Give it a try before you knock it.
21. Create a zine together.
Zine is a word that was taken from the longer word magazine and what it is a homemade or independent short-form magazine. Zines can be about anything. They can be about your friend group's recent trip together or it can be a smashing together of all your favorite hobbies.
You can do a how-to zine or a fan zine. Whatever you want, your friends can create it. While zines were traditionally made offline, there are now an exciting number of tools that enable you to easily make zines online with your friends.
Resource: Design a Magazine and Learn InDesign!
22. Live stream the northern lights.
The northern lights are a unique astronomical phenomenon that occurs at night in those areas really close to the arctic. Both arctics (although they are most commonly talked about in reference to the Northern Hemisphere, hence the name). These are beautiful curtains of lights that really have to be seen to be fully appreciated. Unfortunately, getting that far north can be tough. Fortunately, today's digital screens and cameras make it easier than ever for anyone, anywhere to experience the phenomenon. Log in and live stream it with your own friends.
23. Partake in a virtual happy hour.
This is a simple and yet fun activity that you can do alone or in tandem with any one of the other fun things to d0o with friends online — so long as you are 21 and up of course. All you have to do for a virtual happy hour is to use a live-streaming site like discord or Zoom, your drinks, and your friends on the other line. You can go it alone or sign in to one of the many virtual bars that popped up since the pandemic as a means to offer socialization during lock-downs.
24. Play streamlined board games via BoardGameArena.
There is nowhere online that has a greater selection of board games available to play for free as BoardGameArena. Here, computer programmers have integrated a fantastic user interface that makes playing new games easy and stress-free thanks to an AI that will both set all the games up and ensure users know their available moves. If you or your friends are new to board games but want to play more, then this is a must-try site with its library for over 250 games.
25. Play a 3D board game via Tabletop Simulator or Tabletopia.
Tabletop Simulator and Tabletopia are also board game websites, but there are some significant differences with them from BGA. These sites use a 3D modeling system in which you and your friends can view and play the game virtually as close as you would in real life. This means you use your mouse to grab and manipulate objects, such as physically drawing cards to your hand. You will want to use voice chat for any game you play on either of these sites but you and your friends can enjoy thousands of new games while doing so.
Now Go Out and Have Fun!
We hope this list of fun things to do online with friends has inspired you! (These fun things to do are also great for couples in long distance relationships!)
To get started, just review this list and pick your favorite choice and share a fun time with your friends.
Finally, if you are looking for additional ideas, then be sure to check out our ideas on 21 friendship goals to focus on, 217 fun things to do when bored, 27 fun things you can do as a couple.
