That sort of connection making is happening in varying degrees of private discord servers today. You join the public discord it, you spend time with strangers, if you're likeable you eventually get told about less advertised public servers, or invite-only servers, and you go down a bit of a rabbit hole of loosely interconnected communities. Eventually you find communities that you settle into.

Good filters make for good communities. 20 years ago, being on the internet at all was pre-selecting for certain types of people. That's basically not true anymore. Today, the filters end up being invite systems.