I don't think that rejects get notified so no harm no foul

TL;DR

If you wanna be my friend, you better have the Motts.

I've done the same,just rejected them and one thing about friendship
as far as I'm concerned it has to be earned.
Don't just assume,and ask people to be a friend when we are all strangers.

And remember kiddies,(Stranger,Danger):-)

Such an antisocial point of view. GOG not only wants, but demands that you find friends among their community.
You will be assimilated into the hive mind!

For me the problem with accepting / rejecting is the lack of context. If I don't happen to remember someone, I have no easy way to find out anything about them. Steam has a profile, which most people have public, and that gives me some idea about the games that person plays, possibly some other things (like what they choose to say about themselves). On GOG I only see the date the person joined GOG and their wishlist. Would be cool if they at least added a link to forum posts by that user. Would be more convenient than using Google.

Do what you feel is right. I usually accept request from people with whom I interacted at some point....

That's why I think it's silly to call this feature "Friends list" - I have 3 friends. They are people who have been around me forever, helped me get trough tough times, supported me. I know I can rely on them and trust them without a question. Those are parameters one needs to satisfy for me to call him a "Friend". I know a lot more people, but I would never call them friends, just ... People that I know, colleagues, random acquaintances. Associating the word "Friend" with "I have added this person to my virtual list because I enjoy talking or playing games with him" doesn't sit well with me.

I reject people that I don't know and even worse, I remove people I do know if they don't contact me for a month or so.

On the day of the beta launch I did get a couple of random friend invites from people that I saw on the forum but never interacted with, but I still procrastinated for a while before rejecting them. Some others I have accepted are from people that I know and see on the forum on a regular basis even if I don't interact with them as often.

I haven't sent any invites except to one person who I was sure would accept it as we have had quite a long PM history of messages which are yet to be restored in this new chat system.

Funny, I do the opposite. I'd normally not add someone I could go several months without contacting and could then keep going like usual.

Sadly, I've had two friend requests already... had to approve them on principle. Though it highly agitates me to build a friend list in a forum that I had struggled and worked so hard at to become hated and reviled. Right out of the gates my attempts at misanthropic hilarity are being thwarted.

Oddly enough, once you have a friend list your cool factor decreases by an order of magnitude. Being popular makes you unpopular. Who'da thunk it?

Correct.Maybe they could rename it to something like Gogster Pal.

I think that's the perspective social media is trying to fight. It feels like the idea they are pushing (social media in general, not gog through galaxy in particular) is that they will give you tools facilitating you making friends, although I think it just helps multiplicating loose interactions (for the worse and the best).
But in the end, I think it (potentially) becomes problematic because in all those 'across the world' instances, you can't be a friend to someone who really needs one.

I too have some form of moral dilemma with these 'friends request'. I accepted some, I refused (not rejected) others, and I didn't initiate any (it feels kind of preposterous to likely make people face this moral dilemma).

As our local traveling fruit said, I can't accept a 'request of friendship' with someone I didn't have meaningful interactions with (through PMs or the forum) or from whom I wouldn't know what to talk about.

Like you, I wasn't sure what to do with friend requests. I'm unsure if I should accept or reject them. For now I don't see a point in accepting them (esp. as I presume they've been mostly mass-posted to lots of users, not just specifically to me), but rejecting them might seem a bit rude too, especially for those users I do recognize from the forums and seem like ok folks.

So, I will do neither, but instead I'll start collecting friend requests! So keep them coming, I want to see that open friend request number to raise to new heights. Who knows, maybe these will be worth something at some point of time? Weirder things have happened (like all those badges, trading cards or snowballs on Steam).

(The requests will not expire automatically, right? That would be a shame.)

I think the problem is in the name.

You have to consider that when it comes to social media, or simply the social aspect of places like GOG/Steam, the word "friend" has a different connotation. And that's not a bad thing. I mean calling them "connections", because that's more accurate, would be a bit silly/empty.

Also adding just actual friends would kill the social aspect. For myself at least. I have maybe a couple of people I would "go above and beyond". I wouldn't add everyone but I would keep a looser definition of "friends" for this type of things.