>>106006581
>You have to go to the real world, make things and drag quality people to you, there is no other option.
I've been to hacker space in $bigCity and it was either leftist identity politics or groups not opening to strangers. Let me share a fundamental truth with you: At some age the effort to make new friends and have them trust you is too exhausting. Life itself is already enough work. You are most likely as old as I, that means you remember the time where you'd just go $place and you'd just act as if you were already friends with $person. In elementary you'd make a friend by shaking hands with someone else. As an adult now it's so much harder.
>Every quality community is private and based around gatekeeping the modern net user that I described above.
I agree but this also ruins club culture. Most ham radio clubs are hostile. They'd rather see their hobby die than let "young" people in it. The hostile 70+ hams that even hate 40 year olds because they use a digi mode the analogue ham despises.
>Cultivate a skill and focus on real life above all else, it's not worth your time outside of a select few people you choose to drag into your orbit, the era of being an introverted lurker and finding funny shitposts or decent discussion is mostly over. I'm mad about it too.
Same but there is only friends and family now. Can be lucky already I still do regular old landline calls of 1on1 VOIP with important people over a private secure mumble/murmurd server with TLS1.3