Comment by gs17

> that one isn't isn't likely to meet anyone outside the meetup (or perhaps ever again even inside it).

I don't think that's a post-COVID dynamic as much as a pre-COVID one that got accelerated. When I moved to a new city in 2018, I spent a lot of time at meetups and had exactly that issue. No one would want to meetup outside the group (to be fair, most of it was that some people seemed to be willing to travel really far for a meetup group but not for other things), and you wouldn't see the same people often enough to really be friends within the group.