For the off topic category they should have private post kind of like a chat lobby for you and certain friends. They could also add a feature where you can friend request people on forums. Now you might be saying, “can’t you just do messages?” But group chats can give you 100’s of notifications.
This isn’t true, you get one per chat.
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This is a forum, not a chat platform. If you want to chat, you should use our Discord server or your own private one 
As for implementing friend requests, that isn’t something we can implement, and you’d need to make a suggestion to Discourse if you wish to see this added.
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