Penpal

I'm /u/mediaboy, and I'm one of the mods here on /r/penpals. I've been penpalling as long as I've been on reddit (since June 2012) and when I came to  penpal I'd already been involved with online communities for quite some time.
When people say that friendships with people you haven't met in real life are the same as friendships with people you have met in real life, they're not entirely wrong. I mean, fundamentally, friendships are friendships. But at the same time, there's plenty of differences. I found three key areas to discuss which will make three posts over the next few weeks.
Part 1 is about principles within the idea of penfriend  friends with someone you met online and only talk to remotely. A series of rules which, if followed, can help you to both It's aimed at providing you with some basic guidelines for how you interact with your penpal(s).
Part 2 is about conversation. It suggests some common (safe) areas for conversation, how to move a conversation on, or to deal with a topic in more detail, and all that other "I don't know what to say" kind of thing.
Part 3 is about safety. This will cover language exchange pitfalls, keeping your identity relatively secure during the entire "find a penpal" stage, and touch on the potential dangers of meeting someone (plus how to minimise them!). It's aimed at acknowledging and then helping to minimise dangers, rather than being the typical clickbait "EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE AND YOU'RE GOING TO DIE!"
Part 1: Principles of Online Friendship.
There are three main principles to developing friendship with people you met online.
Be honest
Be open
Be enthusiastic
If at this point you're now baffled by what any of this means, then good news! Expanded versions can be found beneath.
1. Honesty
Honesty is one of those things that is hard to imagine when dealing with a stranger, especially one on the internet. Conventional wisdom is to say as little about yourself as possible, and doing things like providing a fake name can help to prevent potential penpals from Googling you and discovering that you're secretly a hitman for hire.
It's certainly very tempting.
It's also completely and utterly backwards.
To slightly embarrass a friend of mine who will probably be sent a link to this, we first met on Fanfiction.net, then migrated to Kik. Not what we do here, but similar enough in terms of “meeting someone online, and then corresponding with them”. She introduced herself as Alice. Very common name. About two months into talking, I began to discover that I actually cared about Alice. I had emotionally invested myself in our friendship, from the offbeat humour to the sharing of little complaints throughout the day.
So I did a little digging lest it turn out that she was secretly a forty year old man or something. And there was no person with her name in her area of America, let alone with her name doing what she said she was doing.
I confronted her about it, and she fessed up within a day or two as not actually being called Alice. And it hurt. A lot. If she lied about her name, what else did she lie about? Trusting 'Alice' again was very hard. And trust is the basis of any friendship, especially one where you can't see their face.
Once you start questioning every last aspect of something someone says, the friendship - or the correspondence - falls to pieces, because you’re always trying to seek verification that they may not be able to realistically offer.
Another story. I first met someone here on /r/penpals. They introduced themselves as Lena, and then admitted fairly quickly (and well before I had any emotional investment in someone known as "Lena") that it wasn't their name but that it was "good enough for now". Because I knew it was a fake name, I wasn’t offended when it turned out their name was something else.
I was much more cautious about talking to them and what I said, but a little bit of caution is never the end of the world. Discovering someone lied to you might be the end of the correspondence.
Take away moral of the stories? It’s okay to not tell the truth, but don’t deceive your penpal. It never ends well. You’re building correspondences that can last literally years: two of my penpals have crossed the decade mark now, and it isn’t long till a load more pick up at that point. Every lie is one that you’ll have to tell over and over again for months, and eventually you’ll get caught out and they will be upset.
2.Openness
This could almost be seen as a follow-up to the previous tenet of honesty. You need to be open in both your questions and your answers.
Open questions are ones that have answers that are more than just “yes or no”. So you might ask “Which production studio do you think makes the best films?” rather than “Do you think Disney is the best production studio?”. These questions allow people to express themselves more fully, and hence allow you to get to know them more.
As an addendum to this, broader questions tend to work better in any case. “Where would you love to go on holiday?” is a better question than “what’s your favourite tourist destination in the states?” - for all you know, until told otherwise, they never want to travel to America in their life. How would they have a favourite tourist destination?
Open questions, and broad questions, serve as a great way to ensure that conversation keeps moving (which is the basis of correspondence!).
Open answers are also important however. You need to be willing to open up, because that’s how you move from meeting a stranger to holding a correspondence, and from holding a correspondence to having a friend. You need to answer questions honestly (see above!) and also with some length and depth.
“What’s your favourite film” is a question that I dislike, but is asked in nearly every conversation I ever have with someone from /r/penpals. I could quite easily kill that question by saying, for example, “I don’t really have a favourite film” or “My favourite film is Guardians of the Galaxy”. Both of these two answers are equally bad.
“I don’t have one” prevents them from asking a follow-up, hence neutering that conversation completely.
“[this film]” means that they now either have to ask the follow-up “why” (which is always awkward, especially if you’re doing this a lot throughout your emails/letters) or they have to accept that you aren’t going to talk about it and try another angle.
A better response would be one that provides them with the 5 “w”s : what, who, where, when, why. What is your favourite film, who is in it, where did you first see it, when did you first it, when did you last watch it, why is your favourite film?
These aren’t an exhaustive list of follow-up “implied” questions, but it’s certainly a place to start, and a good place to help them find new questions or comments to make. At the end of the day, you get out as much as you put in, and if you only put in closed questions and closed answers, don’t be surprised when you find the conversation closing and petering out.
3. Enthusiasm
Enthusiasm is something that can be very hard to have. Typically, the earlier in the conversation you are, the faster you want to reply as they’re still unsure whether or not they want to talk to you (just as you’re unsure whether or not you really want to talk to them). So fast replies!
Imagine if your coworker at work had a conversation, one sentence a day, over the space of a year. You’d be incredibly frustrated with them. And so it is on the internet.
Of course, things happen. I’ve just come out of the tailend of a month where I was working 7-day weeks, whilst fighting off illness after illness. If I wasn’t asleep, I was puking, if I wasn’t puking I was working. And, of course, this meant that I just didn’t have time to reply to my penpals. And so about two weeks into this period i realised I hadn’t replied at all and quickly sent them a “Hey, I’ve been ill and really busy, I am replying, I promise! I should reply by [date]”
And so long as you then actually do reply within a reasonable period of [date] then no one will think much of it. It’s just how it is. Life happens.
Similarly, message length can be a concern. /r/penpals is a long-form communication method. I wouldn’t like to suggest a good length, because it varies so much person by person. But I would like to suggest that you try to stay at about the same length as them.
I’m currently writing to three people actively (as in: at least once a month). One of them fell away a few years ago because the emails got too long, and so now we’re picking it back up, I’m trying very hard to keep it short. Emails fall at about 2000 words.
Another one is new and is quite nervous about the entire thing, so again, the emails are short so that they don’t feel overwhelmed. Around 2000-3000 words.
Then there’s one who just rambles on, and on, and on, and on. (hey ‘Bumbles’, I’m sure you’ll see this post eventually. Yes I’m talking about you). My last email to them was just under 50 pages in google documents - around 15000 words. My previous email was about 12000 words. “Holy shit!” I can see appearing in the comments beneath. And I should really emphasise that this is unusual: most people just can’t do this because it’s too long. But hey, I can cope, she seems to enjoy it, so why not?
Always try to work with your penpal for the best outcomes.
4. Conclusions
So a tldr for everyone; be honest, be open, reply quickly and reply with a message of around the same length.
I hope this helps everyone in their penpalling :)
Comments, concerns, questions, suggestions (for when I upload this to the wiki) all welcomed!