I did just that, and built https://wonderful.dev
It's based around jobs for devs, but right now it's just a place to chat about tech.
> And this was when I finally realised something that should have been obvious. I had a small group of close friends who were spread across the country. I had a wider group of friends and acquaintances who I’d talk to online.
> But what I lacked was a community.
The “personal brand” and track record might be getting even more important now that the bar to building something has dropped to the floor.
I was about to turn 40 and realized that the place we were staying had a rock wall. In a somewhat "mid life crisis" spur of the moment decision, I decided to go buy shoes, a belt and a chalk bag (I did a lot of indoor rock climbing in college).
We get there and the rock wall is a. closed and b. only for kids.
Get back to the US and COVID lockdown starts. As things open up, I go on the town dad's Facebook group and ask if anyone wants to go rock climbing with me. Multiple dads say "hell, yes!" so I start a rock climbing club.
One of the dads that joins the climbing club loves board games, is inspired by my starting the rock climbing club so he starts the town board game club.
I tell people this story to illustrate that:
- if you don't have a club or org for something that you're into, go start one
- you doing the above can trigger other people to start clubs too
A few years ago I joined my rural neighborhood council, and I’d never been around so many people consistently being generous with their time and energy. It’s really uplifting, and you end up learning a lot from each other in the process too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38158616
The phenomenon began in Australia but it has spread to other countries.
You don’t even to find a group or friends before you go. Just go to the bouldering area and hang out during a popular time.
Most gyms have partner finder programs and designated social nights.
Every gym I’ve been a member of has also had a bring a friend program where you get to bring one new person for free periodically.
Online groups are also a good way to meet new friends. This is HN so a lot of people will turn their nose up at Facebook but it’s full of groups of people who go out and do things.
I live overseas and I’m very lonely. I’ve been told to join a group or club related to my interests so I can meet new people and make friends, but I can’t. It doesn’t feel natural to me to go for friend-hunting. And I’m very tired of meaningless, superficial connections and conversations I’ve had with most of the people from my surroundings. I feel my only friends are the ones I did at school. After that period of my life, people -or even me- start to disappear.
But with my friends from school, we can be without seeing each other for years and it’s always so easy and rewarding to catch up. I wish I’ve spent more time with them before moving :,(
Given nuclear families etc. in the West, this is kinda hard as an adult. Happens automatically as a child and college student, though. My advice to you is:
1) Get a housemate or several. Better yet, join an already shared house. Forget about your preconceptions about whether you "can" live with other people or not. You aren't special, people lived together for ever.
2) Explicitly decide to work through this "doesn't feel natural to me" thing. OK, fine, it's gonna feel kind of awkward at first. By the 5th friend-hunt it won't.
I had a colleague who was member of a dance club, then he had to move to another district, making it super uncomfortable to continue on a regular base - up until today they are calling him every few weeks if he can attend because lack of men
If you move somewhere, and find the same circles why are you surprised that you’re still not happy?
> also, no women
Social groups aren’t just a place for unhappy people to meet a partner. I’d look inwards first.
It sounds like his professional life or personal interests naturally being him in contact with a social circle that isn’t fulfilling socially. Doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with him.
I say, look outward! Intentionally get involved with other social circles.
I find it interesting that I've thought about the exact social mechanics of making friends before as well - low stakes in person common context where you meet on a regular basis is key.
littlecranky, put your reply back please; it was a good one.
They can mostly only ever wish you well.
For me, the significant thing about having local community is the ability to throw stuff together last minute. Not every gathering has to have a spreadsheet of guests and canva invites and endless emails booking a band, a keg, whatever else.
A lot can and should just be "hey dudes, anything doing anything? Want to come over for a game/movie/whatever?" Those kinds of low-stakes hangouts are the real backbone of community, and they're hard to do if you don't have a friend group that's physically close by.
It is such a massive boost to quality of life to just be able on a whim to send a text like “i am tryna grab some food+drink in 15min, you down?” and actually make it happen more than half the time (and being able to receive similar texts from the friend too). Lots of spontaneous interactions and (barely-any-)planning for just normal low-pressure outings was absolutely my favorite part of that time period.
On a sidenote, I absolutely despise the “guest spreadsheet canva invites for an event scheduled a month in advance and endless emails booking a band” way of regularly doing social stuff. It is totally chill and reasonable to do so for special occasions and bigger events, but having it as the primary way of socializing makes me want to drill a hole in my skull.
- This is super relatable (isolation of modern life in a capitalist system, especially as we age)
- I like this reflection on how norms/values can be at odds with modern hyperindividualism
- Woah why are we talking about "woke" all the sudden, red flags. I thought in this year 2026, we all acknowledged that all that "anti-woke"/"free-speech" stuff was a complete smokescreen (at least here in America) now that the same people who fought so hard for it are doing everything they can do undermine it in ways that are orders of magnitude more extreme (e.g. get your visa revoked for supporting Palestine as a student).
- Mild disgust at everything regarding skeptics and the ton of naval-gazing around it. IMO is obvious to everybody in the world (other than "skeptics"/"rationalists") that self-lablebed rational community is not even faintly rational (probably more obviously emotional than a random person on the street) and incredibly pretentious to label themselves so.
- A few paragraphs about inviting friends to bars. Okay right, that's why I clicked on this. WTF did I just read?
Tell me you're in an echo chamber without telling me you're in an echo chamber.
We're equating these government actions to lefties being mean on twitter and cancel culture?
0: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/pros...
1: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/democratic-lawmaker...
2: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...
3: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/federal-judge-rules-trum...
4: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/19/trump-threatening-broadcast-...
- orange man makes dumb obviously unconstitutional proclamation about flag burning
- most likely nobody does anything about it, but if someone does there is a law suit
- the courts are like 'lol no'
- back to status quo ante
Great write-up and encouragement on the author's part.
Hundreds of people came to the funeral, even though it was short notice (24 hours) and in the middle of holiday season. They all dropped whatever they were doing, hopped in their cars or on a plane and came. Friends from his childhood. Friends from his middle/high school years. Friends from his university years, and med school years. People he had worked with and done community service with over the decades. His former students from the decades he taught at the local university. Employees at the hospital he worked at. Family friends. Friends of family. People who knew him by only name and yet still wanted to pay their respects.
I'm Turkish, and community has always played a big role in our culture. But the past few days made me realize that, ever since immigrating to the USA 20+ years ago, community had been supplanted by individualism. Like the author, I work from home. I do have a bit of a social life, and there's a couple of meetups I organize, but the size of my community is nothing compared to my parents. It makes me sad.
Reading this article gave me some hope. It reminded me that ultimately it's a matter of putting in the work, which I am determined to do. Not because I want to maximize the number of people who come to my eventual funeral or anything like that, but because I do want to live a richer life and the best way to do that is to share it with others.
Sorry if the above was all over the place. Things are still raw.
The biggest difference in how the author approached and how I did: he did it monthly; I did it weekly. I found that made a HUGE difference in building community. If it's once a month, and people come on average 50% of the time, then you'll see these people 6 times a year. That's nice, but one of my goals was to build real, deep relationships with more people, and having a party where I speak a few minutes to each person (if you're the host, it's hard to get more than 30 minutes with one person) 6 times a year - you can't really build a real relationship. Also, once a month puts pressure on people psychologically to attend, but I wanted it low-key, "Come if you want, if not next week, or the week after - or never! It's all cool and you go live your life and you be you!" was part of the vibe I was going for, and it's easier to get that vibe when it's all the time, but the less frequent it is, the more subconscious pressure there is, and I wanted a low-key event (for example, imagine a wedding - that's very irregular, hopefully once in your life - so there's massive pressure to attend, and I wanted the precise inverse).
But my doing it weekly, made it a bit more like church/synagogue, in the best communal sense of the word: a place to go at the same time, same place every week, time to build real relationships, you always knew you'd have a place to go, etc. And because many of the people were the same week on week, it naturally led to longer, deeper conversations, both individual and group conversations.
I was also strict on a few rules. There were a few topics that were banned from being discussed ("politics, business, and sports" basically - and everyone knew going in those were banned) so that forced people to avoid those generic and tiresome topics that (politics in particular) just make unhappy. Also, I had a very strict "no cell phone" rule and I enforced putting cell phones into a box near the entrance.
It also became a HUGE success in my city. Mentioned in the media and featured in videos. Because it became known as the nexus of interesting conversations in a spot with cool energy. Many dotcom/tech superstars as well as ambassadors and other interesting and curious figures, when they were in my city for a few days for business, they'd hear that my apt was the place to be that night and they'd contact me to invite themselves.
It revolutionized my life and my social network. I'd strongly recommend everyone who is suffering from these same sorts of social challenges create their own sort of variation of this concept.
This lasted almost a decade, almost every Wednesday night from 2007 to 2016. Then... adult life happened: family, moving internationally, and... alas. I have a personal challenge these days that I should invest energy in figuring out: the best way to reboot this for me, but in the world I life in now, not only post-covid, but with kids and family life. Sometimes I think about rebooting it but in a public venue on my "date night", sometimes I think about doing a "Zoom" version of this where it's beers on Zoom, etc etc there are many possible ways to approach this challenge - but I haven't yet been inspired with the right formula for me.
There's a time and place for everything under the sun and this was a beautiful and life-changing era of my life.
If anyone is interested in creating their own version of this (particularly the OP), just drop me a line and I'm more than happy to Zoom any time with you and give you some tips. My email is morgan@westegg.com (I still love meeting people even if through email and Zoom!), and my personal website is westegg.com and I have an ancient and embarrassingly bad web page 2008 tumblr-style page about these events at: wnip.org - If the above sounded interesting, I'm always up for a brainstorm so ping me!
Between the consistent curation and Morgan’s "Kevin Bacon-style" network, I met a huge spectrum of people—both locals and world travelers.[1])
Side note: if you’re in a relationship, these nights are even better. You end up with so many fresh ideas to share with your partner from conversations they weren't part of.
Thanks for hosting, Morgan! And a special thanks to Celia for being so gracious about those late-night "extra innings"
To elaborate, in the US, existing groups tend to be narrow and uninteresting to me. In most places I've lived, it's basically a mix of sports/fitness groups, art groups, "tech" (i.e., programmer; traditional engineers like myself won't feel entirely welcome), social dancing, popular fiction reading group, activism, etc. I can't say that any of these genuinely interest me and/or would be a good place to meet people. At a fitness class, for example, many people aren't interested in casual conversation as far as I'm aware. And without genuine interest in the subject, it's hard to engage.
I honestly wish social clubs were a thing, and you would get introduced to people from all walks of life. Perhaps this is the reason the Internet is so polarizing: people don't intermingle much, they live in their small niches and echo chambers, and have to put real effort and go out of their way to engage with someone that has a new perspective. Algorithms entrenching us deeper within the same niches are to blame.
I enjoy socialising (sparingly), but I'm not an extrovert and herding people is not my definition of fun, yet I keep feeling I should be the one to form whatever community I and people like me would enjoy participating in. What a conundrum. It's also much easier to make and advertise a club around a topic than an open one for "interesting" people without sounding like a posh cult for elitists.
I think it's possible to get around the problem, but it would take just the right structure; there should be activities, but enough of a variety to have something for people from all walks of life. But also not too much of a variety so as not to appeal only to those interested in constantly trying new things. Perhaps a set of some baseline, fairly universal activities, with space for individual members to share their own hobbies and interests from time to time in a group setting? I don't know exactly, but it's something I've been considering for a while, and it feels like there must be an answer somewhere in there.
As for specific topics, there are many I could pick. My problem isn't a lack of interest in general, just a lack of overlap between my interests and what's available. One I think might have a decent chance of success would be a group based around information searching, both online and in the real world. Despite being an engineer, I've often found a lot of common ground with librarians. I love talking about the subject and could learn a lot about it. It's not going to become irrelevant any time soon either, even with LLMs, due to information siloing.
My obligations at home keep me from trying out new things more often. But I'm trying to be more active online. And using a co working space once a week.
yakattak•2h ago
It’ll be a slightly different approach to the other though. For me, I want to start playing some tabletop games (war games and/or RPGs) at my Friendly Local Game Shop. I think these types of interactions are important for community.
alexfoo•1h ago
This gets us out of the house, gives us some time away from each other and kids, and gives us some interaction with some other people (who work for completely different companies) but are kind of like colleagues in terms of gentle office banter, water-cooler chats, etc.
I know loads of them by name, who they work for, what they do and there are occasional bonus interesting chats where some aspect of our two industries/jobs overlap slightly. There's one person who is just starting out doing something similar to a niche job I did 15 years ago, so it's great to speak to him and act as a kind of mentor.
Fully remote work is great, and I could be a happy recluse, but I'm all for more in-person interaction during the working day. Next job I think I'll go back to hybrid with 1-3 days in an office if possible.
ToucanLoucan•1h ago
It kills me. They are so addicted to their comforts, to their security, to their home. And I get why, they have had a tremendously bad couple of years… but I just see the repeated behaviors reinforcing the issue. I get told over and over “we just need a few months where nothing bad happens” but like… dude. That’s not coming. The bad shit always happens, it’s going to continue until you die. The only way to make that worse is to self isolate and make yourself miserable constantly between those bad things.
If anyone has advice, I would super appreciate it. I’m so worried for them.
squigz•1h ago
Of course, I know that from your perspective, it can be frustrating and painful, and that nobody can be expected to remain infinitely patient. I don't blame people for eventually throwing in the towel...
ToucanLoucan•1h ago
Panoramix•1h ago
lr4444lr•56m ago