Hobbies were always my go to in the past, but honestly I didn’t have a ton of luck with that. I’ve made most of my new friends this past year in one of three ways:

• Starting a group for people like me. I run a small but global chat group for people to find friends, I won’t be linking it for privacy and safety reasons even in DMs, sorry.
• Activism. Activists are the nicest people on the planet and just being in their presence generates friends. I’m on my way home from a huge protest, and I basically just walked around and sat in tents and people just befriended me without me prompting at all. The exposure at events like this has boosted my confidence a huge amount and now I’m one of those people who actively befriends others too.
• Volunteering. Same thing as activism tbh, you build a sense of camaraderie very easily when you’re working towards a common goal. I cooked about ~1000 meals at that protest as a volunteer cook and made about 20 friends in the first hour, it’s nuts.