There are apps like Meetup, but a lot of people just find it too awkward. Introverts especially do not want to meet just for the sake of meeting people, so they fallback on social media.
Maybe this situation is fundamentally not helped by software. All of my best friendships organically formed in real-world settings like school, work, neighborhood, etc.
This is at core a 3rd places issue, haven't had the capital to restart it post covid.
We intentionally set out to create a social club/co-working space. A lot goes into it. I'm a non-theist who comes from a multi generational group of theist church planters (like 100s of churches, just over and over), it's a multi factorial process with distinct transitions in space-time and community size, where each transition has to be handled so you don't alienate your communities founding members (who will be very different from later members) and still are able to grow.
People don't do it because they can't see the value while they are in the early mess of it. You have to like people to pull it off, you have to NOT be a high control person who can operate at high control at certain developmental stages. You have to have a moral compass everyone understands and you are consistent with, tech people like 0 trust. You have to create a maximum trust environment which means NOT extracting value from the community but understanding that the value is intrinsic in the community.
You have to design a space to facilitate work and play. It's not hard but you have to get everything right, community can't have mono culture and it must be enjoyable/uncomfortable, and you must design things so people can choose their level of engagement and grow into the community. It's easier once it has enough intertia that they understand they are building a thing with real benefits.
Even things like the flow of foot traffic within the space, chokepoints narrowing, these kinds of thing all effect how people interact.
Because these 3rd spaces are open to anyone and probably bringing people in from internet commmunties. What do you do when someone comes along and they're not breaking any rules but its clear that no one likes them? I've seen it drive entire groups away but because the person has done nothing wrong I cant/dont want to just say "fuck off kid no likes your weird ass"
It isn't a single conversation or room. It isn't a single relationship cluster.
And someone is paying the insurance bill. Ultimately that person gets final say. A successful 3rd place can have tension, but not fools (in the economic sense, a person whose decision making and choices actively destroy the groups financial opportunities and stability. Theoretically a very clumsy person might be banned.)
There's a lot to unpack, I mean social dynamics, group polity, these really start with understanding what you really want to see brought into the world and why.
These things take fluidity, nuance and effort to get off the ground. Sometimes they just get lucky too. It's hard to tell ahead of time, proximity is important, population density is important, parties are important.
Getting initial traction is the hardest part, most groups die before they get a chance to have problems, that's why tying the groups space to a stable economic engine like an anchor company or a mission agency is so critical for repeatable success. Same with a small friend group as initial anchor, they just can't all be clique people.
The one thing that's very important is to always frame the space as a place for creating and experimenting, celebrate the amateur and the pursuit of mastery, getting started with a group of taste makers instead of doers will 100% kill your group.
Getting started with hypernetworkers who don't do things will kill your group. They'll show up and they are important later on.
All of these people have a place eventually but they can't form the dynamic core. The whole goal is to eventually have a place for every type of person so they can contribute to the whole and find the space where they can be celebrated, but a group has to be larger before certain types of people can bring their core skills to bear.
Functioning, welcoming, and well-ran communities are the only thing that solves this. Unfortunately, technology often makes this worse, because it creates such a convenient alternative and also creates a paradox of choice. I.e. people think "when there's 1000 meetups to check out, and this one isn't perfect, I'll just move onto the next one" when actually it's the act of commitment that makes a community good.
A third place would fix this, especially for men who need "things". You go to a bar for "thing" and if you meet some others to yell at sports with, bonus. We have less "things" for gen Z, and those things happen rather infrequently in my experience. I'm not sure if a monthly Meetup is quite enough to form strong bonds.