[smashem]

Face-to-face social gatherings - parties, dinners, clubs, meetups

Membership organizations - country clubs, professional associations, alumni networks, charitable boards

Personal introductions and referrals - being introduced through mutual acquaintances

Cultural and civic participation - involvement in local institutions, community organizations, religious groups

[piglet_bear]

Ha, I can only wish. Maybe true if you live in NYC, SF, Berlin or London.

But most of these don't exist or help with socializing and making new connections where I live (medium sized European university city).

Everyone here only hangs out with their family and school/university mates and that's it. Any other available events are either for college students or lonely retirees but nothing in between.

[RiverCrochet]

> Everyone here only hangs out with their family and school/university mates and that's it.

If you can get a few people from 2 of these groups together more than once, you've started solving this problem. Of course keeping it going for a long time is a challenge, and you want to avoid always being in the situation where you are doing all the work and others aren't contributing, but it gets easier and better with experience.

[piglet_bear]

Except that if you're not anyone's family and not in university anymore then you're shit out of luck as people in their 30s already have their social circles already completed and don't have space, time and energy to add new strangers when they barely have free time to hang out with their existing clique.

[nradov]

There are also private group chats open only to selected elite and wealthy people. When you see several prominent people suddenly make similar public statements on a particular issue there's a good chance they used those group chats behind the scenes to coordinate messaging.