Just force everybody to interact. Obligatory meetings for the whole village/city district/city block (depending on size of population) every saturday morning with local news, coffee and cake and maybe games or time for chatting.
I don’t think there is a solution. I think this is the path and these are the results.
Hamsters? I didn’t know y’all enough to trust you with cats or dogs outright.
Chatbots
Less pants
Get a personality. It worked for me!
Nationalizing dating sites.
These sites work great to match people when corpos aren’t allowed to fuck with the algorithms
Walkable neighborhoods with affordable places to hang out.
Need to bring back Internet cafes.
Did those actually provide any sort of social outlet?
That’s similar to the reason my company gives for having to be in the office but I work on the computer and go home. The only people I interact with are my remote peers
Just have a war. Nothing brings people together like necessity and shared trauma.
Don’t worry, that war isn’t far off.
Is it too harsh to say to outside and interact with people?
The reason there were mountain men in the old days is that they appreciated nature and they didn’t feel alone though they often were. It’s not that hard to rekindle that feeling you only have to work at it a little. I was taking walks in the woods back when I was in grade school and I seldom feel alone though it’s harder to feel like that in a city.
no more social media
a government dating app that has no algorythm, no payment, punishes mass scrollers, and has a ton of admins who actually ban the idiots out. we have the technology, but its all enshitificated.
This would work approximately as well as all the current apps. The people you want to date are either already in relationships, date without using the apps, aren’t dating right now, or simply don’t want to date you because you aren’t their type or aren’t good enough for them. The idea that the evil corporations know exactly who your perfect match is and are keeping them from you is a fantasy. The fact is, dating apps don’t work for most people because most people don’t put the effort in to present themselves well and put themselves out there.
There are at least 2 open source dating apps that I’ve seen, although one of them has 4chan branding. Not sure about the other.
For a lot of people in suburbia, the entire concept of indoor “third spaces” is mostly “pay to play” at the end of a drive. A big exception to this is/were shopping malls, but those aren’t always close by. To get to more a functional social fabric, we have to provide more convenient ways of interfacing with our neighbors that don’t always require money to change hands.
Perhaps this is a predictably orange-pill response, but we need to change zoning in a big way. Each suburban development has the street plan and infrastructure to support small businesses and common spaces, walking-distance from everyone’s front door. All it takes is to allow small-scale commercial development in corners of these collections of tract-homes and, just like that, you can have something like a functional village. Beyond that, encouraging more development of community recreation space, both indoor and outdoor, would go a long way to provide a place for people to mingle.
Edit: strip-malls don’t count. They’re often at the very edge of residential areas, and are tied up with way more capital than what I’m talking about. That’s why they’re made up of franchises, require ridiculous amounts of parking, and contribute to “stroads” and all the knock-on effects and hostile architecture that requires.
