Do you mean online friendships, or meeting people online that are open to IRL friendships?

Anything, really.

it’s surprising that you’re not meeting anyone from hookup platforms – all of my friends were once sniffies hookups that morphed from fuck buddies to platonic friends.

I’m not in that scene really. I have a fetlife account but it’s not really going anywhere because my fetish is much bigger on Reddit and I refuse to use Reddit for sexual matters.

I refuse to use Reddit for sexual matters.

VERY smart – the epstein people specifically mentioned reddit as a high priority platform and their “business model” is using sex-based kompromat to control you.

this is literally out in the open; in writing; and vetted by the federal government – yet people continue using reddit like it’s not true anyways… it’s SO confusing to me.

Interesting. Too bad I’m very open about my sexual likes. There is hardly a way of using that as an avenue to blackmail me. My political activity is much more interesting and even that is public.

Not saying blackmail is fine. It’s crazy though how effective it is against most people. Where in the files is the kompromat thing btw?

it’s all public and highly valuable if the way that the american gov’t gave grindr the tiktok treatment when the chinese bought it a while ago is any indication.

Where in the files is the kompromat thing btw?

the maxwell court case documents.

you’ll need to jump through legal hurdles to get it and it’s all just as piecemeal and difficult to understand as the epstein files themselves without the context to give you an understanding of what any of it means, so getting a copies that are still floating around online or following a social media influencer who put in the work to explain it are your best bets to see it yourself – presuming that tiktok hasn’t shut them all down by now.

you’ll need to jump through legal hurdles to get it and it’s all just as piecemeal and difficult to understand as the epstein files themselves without the context to give you an understanding of what any of it means, so getting a copies that are still floating around online or following a social media influencer who put in the work to explain it are your best bets to see it yourself – presuming that tiktok hasn’t shut them all down by now.

I guess I’ll have to do my own research

Meetup.com is going strong. Lots of groups even in my relatively unpopular area

I just checked this out but $10 a week just to find local groups is ridiculous! I’m not even looking for dates and now even the not-really-for-dating app is paid. No wonder people can’t meet anyone anymore.

Edit: I was duped by their subscription screen. I was wrong

Wow, that’s pretty nuts. Good for them to not make it riddled with ads but $10 a month?!

$10? How do you get to that price? I see groups in my local area without even logging in. There is a Pro option, which is for organizers who organize more things.

I was duped by their subscription page during setup. I’ll edit my comment.

Meetup has recently doubled their prices to run a group, and it’s definitely impacting groups that I’m in. It’s not unusual for organizers to ask for $10-15 from attendees to cover these high organizer subscription costs.

It also feels excessively greedy that they have locked more features behind a user subscription.

Yeah, I was about to say: meetup is pretty much dead. I live in an area of 350k people, and I think there is one for hiking and one for atheism (which makes no sense to me, like, at all. What are you going to do? Talk about what you don’t believe in?)

The allure is a sense of community. Vancouver has an athileist group and they do community things and meetups, like a church but without the skydaddy stuff

What’s an athiliest? Athleticism?

What are you going to do? Talk about what you don’t believe in?

Some groups organize to try and keep religion beliefs out of Governs and law making or to give support to atheists that come from religious background.

They killed OkCupid’s question match thing because it was working too well for giving you conversation starters.

Online dating sites aren’t profitable if you have successful dates and stop being single

For friendships, meetup is a nice way to meet people and do activities together. There’s a bunch of different groups that focus on different activities (board games, hikes, book clubs, etc.)

Dating wise, unfortunately the big popular apps are the way to go. (Tinder, hinge, coffee meets bagel). The problem with making your own is that you’d need users, ideally nearby. Not saying it’s not possible but it would take a long time, while the above apps already have that.

It’s true I’d need users. But what I am planning on making has one significant advantage, namely the, forgive my poor wording, overcoming of traditional economical constraints. The big technical challenge would probably be dealing with bots and finding the constraints that make it hard to act antisocially. I really want people to have access to a straight forward method of connecting with strangers that is unenshittifiable. Even if it doesn’t go anywhere, it’s still a practice in doing something better.

Oh please tell us more about Your matrix experience, you can’t leave us hanging like that

It’s multi-layered.

I tried out rooms that were a bit off the beaten path. It seemed like the smaller a room was the more racist and misogynistic the users, sometimes even flat out advocating fascism. I was not dealing with skinheads, these people were too awkward to have the experience necessary to understand why you would not want to be bigoted. We’re talking people with very narrow perspectives.

Then there was a person who I later found out was a l*li**n whose instance I joined. The tone of discussion there wasn’t terrible, certainly not as bad as the other smaller rooms, but the admin of the instance was prone to meltdowns and slightly controlling. I would have fights with him over politics since he was libertarian and I wasn’t. He would accuse me of not respecting other people’s opinions, including his own. Opinions like “ICE good, darn immigrants bad.” He would also accuse me of being combative and not being able to deal with criticism because I dissented when he gave his takes on politics that were verbatim positions from Ayn Rand Institute articles. He’d call me a collectivist without giving any argument as to why. My criticising and not letting myself be swayed by half-arguments somehow meant that I couldn’t handle or didn’t expect criticism myself.

At some point he sent me a meme insinuating he was, ahem, interested in his friends’ younger sisters when he was in high school. I regretfully tolerated that, but I stopped being able to take him seriously on some level. I decided to end the relationship after he wrote to me about sexual experiences he had when he was sixteen. I told him I didn’t want to hear any of it and went ahead non the less. Luckily the content wasn’t quite as explicit. If it had been I would have ended things on far colder terms.

Matrix is in general quite the different different experience. A handful of governments use it because Matrix is basically being marketed towards the security sector. I think a lot of the oddness also stems from that.

In my experience as a former free speech absolutist, I find that the best communities are well-moderated. Unmoderated ones inevitably become full of scam ads and csam links.

I’m all for Dread and Tor but I now understand them has necessarily double-edged swords

As a gamer: For only online communitys i’d say MMO Guilds are still a thing and can be a gateway into existing friendsgroups. VR Chat was doing ok in that regard too a few years back, no idea where they stand now. A guy i know spends most of his evenings there and has had several real live meetups with a group thad bonded there. A bit niche maybe. I have had regular contacts that build trough gaming and people inviting me into their discord servers (yes, yes, i know…), which lead to me joining some online Pen and Paper groups that often lead to releative good ways of finding cool people, because you tend to learn a lot about them when doing pen and paper.

If you’re not into online gaming but are ok with board games, there are several open meetups, at least in my area.

And finaly, local communitys are a thing. We have groups here that meet regulary and go pick up trash in the forest, for example. Or abowling, art or what ever club.

Unless you have a mobility restriction, It might be easier to try local meet up groups that have similar interests. www.meetup.com

That way people are somewhat vetted to have a real interest in something, and want to form friendships.

Online can be a cesspool of flakes.

Decent sites, sure, but not decent people.

Acespace is interesting

I’m trying it out. It’s pretty decent.

The main feed thing is kind of interesting, I’m not very familiar with a lot of these sites but it’s cool it’s got a social aspect to it That’s not just about getting laid or something.

I’ve heard good things about Bumble BFF

Check your nearby cities have active subreddits (I know blasphemy on lemmy lol)

The people in those usually are well adjusted adults that happen to know a lot about internet culture because they are also interested in finding the local niches.

Hop on IRC.

This is like saying “hop on Firefox” once you have the app, where do you go?

netsplit.de/channels/?net=libera.chat

Good starting point

Game modding + Discord have brewed many friendships

Online hobby communities. So if your into gaming/modding, join some discords or whatever and then eventually you can translate to irl. Especially if you live near a big city/population.

Also, my wife 5 years ago made about 5 new friends on Bumble with friend feature thing. Still hang out with two of them.