Great messages Melinda. I also never expected to form relationships of any form on Medium but I have. It's the only social media I engage with. Early last year in response to a prompt "what kind of people do I attract, I wrote a tanka titled Medium's a Soul Incubator:

What kinds I attract?

worldly souls thinkers writers

Kind life livers all

I shall not assign labels

Read with eyes and minds answer

Regarding your excellent point on affordance, a couple of weeks before that tanka I wrote one titled Synchronicity of Familiarity Across the Diaspora,

Blessing of incarnating in the information age:

Mind reads strangers’ texts

assigning words my own voice

Third-eye hears old friends’

distinctly familiar

yet no conscious memory

Part of my explanation was "I imagine that to affect each other’s past lifecycles and life lessons we had to spark matter into lives within roughly the same geographic community, and we had to physically meet to recognize the energy signatures of our kindred spirits and soulmates. In the internet age, our soul groups get to experience and share with each other multiple cultures and distinctly different topographies due to the advent of social media, of which Medium is such a platform."