There's a moment in almost every online friendship where the conversation flattens out. You've covered the basics, the "how was your day" well runs dry, and you're both typing slower because neither of you knows what to say next. The fix isn't a better question. It's a shared activity. So here's a running list of things to do with online friends that don't involve staring at a blinking cursor, from the obvious to the ones you probably haven't tried.

Watch something together, at the exact same time

The simplest upgrade from texting is watching. Not "hey, you should see this video" and then waiting an hour for them to get around to it. I mean actually pressing play at the same second and reacting in real time. On Chatarooni you can paste a YouTube link and the video plays in sync for both of you, play and pause mirrored, and either person can swap in a different video when the current one runs out. It turns a quiet chat into something closer to sitting on the same couch.

The trick is to lean into the commentary. The video is the excuse; the running reactions are the point. I wrote a whole piece on the small rituals that make this work in how to watch YouTube together when you're apart, if you want the full setup.

Play a quick game without leaving the chat

A lot of friendships live and die on whether there's anything to do in the dead air. A fast game fills it perfectly. Right inside a Chatarooni conversation you can challenge your friend to tic-tac-toe, four-in-a-row, or a full game of chess, moves syncing live for both of you, with a rematch button waiting the second someone wins. It sounds almost too simple, and that is exactly why it works: it's low-stakes, it's instant, and a best-of-seven somehow turns into an hour. I wrote about why we started with games in introducing games inside the chat.

Watch-together and quick in-chat games are the two things baked directly into Chatarooni, but they're a tiny slice of what's possible. The rest of this list is the stuff I do with my own online friends using whatever tools we already have open.

Build something side by side

Some of the best online hangs don't feel like hanging out at all, because you're both pointed at a shared project. The conversation happens around the work instead of being the work, which takes all the pressure off.

Co-op video games

A drop-in co-op game is the gold standard. Stardew Valley, Minecraft, It Takes Two, anything where you're building or surviving together rather than fighting each other. The shared goal manufactures conversation for free. You'll talk more in an hour of farming pixelated crops than in a week of "what's up."

A collaborative playlist

Start a shared playlist and trade songs into it over weeks. It becomes a slow, ambient conversation: you learn someone's taste, you fight gently about whether a track belongs, and months later you've got a soundtrack that is unmistakably yours and theirs. Low effort, surprisingly intimate.

A doc, a board, a map

A shared Google Doc for a road trip you'll probably never take. A Pinterest board of apartments you can't afford. A collaborative drawing tool where you both scribble nonsense. The artifact barely matters. The point is having a little corner of the internet that only the two of you tend.

Make a standing ritual out of it

One-off activities are great, but the friendships that actually last are the ones with a heartbeat. A recurring thing on the calendar beats a hundred "we should hang out soon" messages that never turn into anything.

A weekly watch night. Pick a series, agree on an episode count, and queue it up in sync every Thursday. The commitment is what makes it stick.
A shared book or show. Read the same chapters, watch the same season, then take it apart together. You get the book-club feeling without the awkward room full of strangers.
A standing game night. Same time, same game, no agenda. Knowing it's on the calendar means you never have to do the dance of asking if the other person is free.
An end-of-week recap. Trade the three weirdest things that happened to each of you. It's a structured prompt that keeps the "how was your week" conversation from going stale.

Get a little competitive

Friendly competition is criminally underrated as a bonding tool. It gives you stakes, a reason to talk trash, and a built-in reason to come back tomorrow for the rematch.

A daily word game and a screenshot of your scores. An online chess game you both pretend you're bad at. A trivia round. The tic-tac-toe rematch button on Chatarooni exists for exactly this energy, the "okay, best of three, no, best of five" spiral that keeps two people in a chat far longer than they planned. The scorekeeping is half the fun.

Do parallel, not just together

Here's the one people underestimate. You don't always need a shared activity. Sometimes the best thing is doing your own separate tasks while loosely keeping each other company. Body-doubling, if you want the productivity-blog name for it.

You clean your room, they do their taxes, and you check in every twenty minutes. You both cook dinner with the chat open. It mimics the comfort of having a friend physically in the house: not constant interaction, just a low background hum of company. For online friendships stretched across time zones, this is one of the most underrated tools there is, and I dug into more of them in long-distance friendship ideas that aren't just "we should call".

Where a new friend comes from in the first place

All of this assumes you already have an online friend to do things with. If you're still looking, the whole reason Chatarooni exists is to close that gap. You hit start, get paired with a random stranger who's online right now, and if you click with someone you can send a friend request mid-chat. Accept it and you get a permanent direct-message thread, plus you can see when they're online. No account required to start, no phone number, no cost. It's the simplest path from "total stranger" to "person I beat at tic-tac-toe every Tuesday."

A few honest notes if you go that route. It's 18+. You stay anonymous under a random nickname by default, with no account, email, or phone number needed to start. The FAQ covers the rest, and you can just open the app and try it.

The actual point

Texting is the connective tissue of an online friendship, but it can't carry the whole thing on its own. Shared activities give the relationship somewhere to go. The watching, the games, the dumb playlists, the parallel chores: none of them are complicated, and that's the appeal. Pick one off this list, try it this week, and notice how much easier the conversation flows when you've both got something to point at. If you need a friend to try it with, that part is one tap away.

Things to Do With Online Friends Besides Just Texting