may need to hit multiple stores. if your favorite hang out isn’t promoting their game nights in meet up and such, they are losing out on a valuable marketing possibility. i can only hope that more women see it as a possibility, now that d&d streaming is getting more popular.

also biking is a terrible place to try, everyone’s too busy breathing to talk

buti look in the meetup app for things… too bad it’s a “professional ladder climbing” and “timeshare/market share/pyrmid scheme” app nowadays…

Meetup.com has been around for years. I think it was founded after 9/11 and the owner was like "what am i doing with my life? i want to meet people". I knew a bunch of people who worked there, and they were always sad that such a good idea wasn't managed better. I go to one local meetup for board games, and I used to go to another one that was just "brooklyn outdoor hangouts".

So far as I know they're not particularly privacy invasive. They make money by charging the people running the meetups, so there's less incentive to screw with the attending users. My friends don't work there anymore though, so I'm not up to date on their latest.

Another vector for finding stuff was location based. Like, looking up places and seeing what they're offering. There's a community center not far from me, so I looked up what kind of stuff they do. They have recreational sports, book clubs, some sort of ballroom dancing class, and more. The local library also does events. I went to a couple of those I found on their website. There are board game cafes near me that do regular events, though you often have to pay so I don't go to them much. Prospect Park (the big park in brooklyn) does some events too, but those seem to be mostly one-off. For making friends and finding partners you want recurring encounters.

I know bars are a cliché, but some do events you can enjoy without drinking booze. One near me does D&D nights in the back. I didn't join but I chatted with them, and they meet on the regular. Trivia nights are popular, though I found that works better if you bring at least one existing friend to get started.

For new york, there are also websites like https://donyc.com/free-events-nyc . I haven't used this much, but a friend swears by it. I don't think it's as good for making new friends, because of a lot of the stuff is like big, impersonal, events. But your local city might have a similar publication.

Less useful for getting started, there's also word of mouth. A friend of mine told me about a local recreational sports league they play in. Someone else told me about a bird watching club that meets in the mornings.