I'll answer your question with a question. In the past, I would have recommended finding a Meetup on some activity you enjoy. Meetup isn't as popular anymore (another victim of COVID and WFH culture), but the spirit of the idea is sound. Are there apps or services that fill that void these days?
Respectfully disagree. COVID and WFH really was a brick wall to Meetup's momentum.
WeWork bought Meetup because tons of tech Meetups used WeWork spaces to host events.
This acquisition made a lot of sense, IMO. Many companies at the time were much more employee-friendly than now and liked having their employees (who mostly worked in the office) host cool events with free food. Nearly everyone was already downtown, free pizza is free pizza, and talking about Ruby or DevOps or whatever sure as shit beat traffic. This was especially true for startups, which were in WeWork offices.
COVID lockdowns were a huge collective wet blanket atop all of that for obvious reasons.
Moreover, everyone working from home added huge inertia to what was previously a very natural chain of events. Driving downtown for events (and dealing with traffic) was/is a huge commitment, free pizza or not (which isn't really free anymore after you account for gas). Those events being in worse spaces (since event space got harder to find) didn't help.
All of this affected social Meetups too, albeit less so. You used to be able to build a calendar of the Meetups you wanted to hit in a day. If you were already at NY Tech Meetup for something, hitting up a social meetup afterwards was easy.
