I would bond with them through this shared hobby, make acquaintances, even friends, people who you could recognise even if it was just a nickname.
My first real software development job was through friends I met on IRC and forums, they knew me for years, and offered me an internship after we had worked on a hobby project for a Ultima Online game server.
Fast-forward to now, it is really hard for young people to find shared spaces with a sense of community, in the real world or online. Everything they experience online is through mass platforms where everyone is basically anonymous even though it became much more common to share your real name. How can you bond with someone in the comments section of a YouTube video about your hobby? Or in the comments of some TikTok/Instagram post that was quite interesting? You simply can't, that post or video will disappear from others' feeds, there's no sense of permanence of the members of a community.
I think the closest to this experience might be some Discord servers, it's one of the ways I found to try to meet people on my current hobbies but the experience is still very different than the tight-knitted groups of IRC channels from the past. Forums, for the most part, were eaten by reddit, for some hobbies there are still quite a few active ones but the discoverability is much worse, you will have to jump through some hoops (usually starting on a subreddit) to find one of those.
My feeling is just that community in general is in decline, I'm lucky to have managed to keep finding these bubbles and sticking with them, online or in the real world, but when I talk to my colleagues in the 20-24 age bracket I sense they simply don't have communities. They have a few friends who they might meet for a shared activity but they generally don't know a place where they can go and meet other similarly-minded folks.
The screens end up as a bad refuge to try to find these connections that were much more natural when we were young.
