I met one of my closest friends on r/needafriend. Turns out, she lived like a 10 minute walk from me - and we met up over some food.

On paper, our friendship shouldn’t work. We have little in common in terms of activities and goals. But we know how to make each other laugh and ‘get’ each other’s personality. Been like 9 years.

Whether it’s Reddit, Lemmy, Discord or some other platform - there’s definitely people out there looking for the same things. Online is a good place to start.

See if your closest city has a ‘Speed Friending’ event. Here in Boston, we have “Skip the Small Talk” and you get seated with a stranger and a dialogue prompt. I found that to be really effective too.

Lemmy is Reddit.
Mastadon is Twitter.

Kbin is a bit of both.

They federate. So imagine using your Reddit account to reply to a tweet. And vice versa.

They don’t share the same servers - they just communicate with each other. Kind of like how I can use Gmail to write to a friend that uses a Yahoo Mail.