What Meeting Apps Actually Do Once You've Moved Somewhere New

Moving somewhere new used to come with a built-in workaround: you joined the church, the union hall, the bowling league, because that’s what was there. Robert Putnam’s account of American civic life describes exactly how much of that infrastructure has thinned out since the mid-twentieth century. What’s left, for a lot of people, is an app on a phone and the hope that it does the work a neighborhood used to do.

It’s worth being specific about what these apps actually do, because they don’t do the same thing. Three of them — Buffet, Timeleft, and Meetup — solve different pieces of the same problem, and each one has a real limitation that its marketing will not tell you about.

The problem underneath all three

The share of Americans with no close friends at all rose from 3% in 1990 to 12% in 2021, according to a survey from the Survey Center on American Life. For men specifically, the number with six or more close friends fell from 55% to 27% over the same period, and 15% of men now report having none. That’s not a small dip. It’s a generation-scale drop in the informal machinery that used to produce friendship as a side effect of just being somewhere regularly — the same machinery Putnam was already describing the erosion of twenty-five years ago.

Apps can’t rebuild a bowling league. But they can solve a narrower, more solvable problem: getting you and one or more strangers into the same room at the same time, on purpose. That’s genuinely useful, and it’s also genuinely limited. None of them can make you go a second time, and going a second time is the part that actually matters.

Buffet: matched to one person, once

Buffet, as reported by TechCrunch when it launched in Los Angeles, works like this: you list five interests and answer a short personality questionnaire, and an algorithm matches you with one other person and a venue where you’re both meant to show up. It’s freemium, and the pitch is squarely against the loneliness of a city where you don’t know anyone yet.

The upside is obvious. It removes two of the most exhausting parts of making a new friend as an adult: deciding who to ask, and deciding where to go. Both decisions get made for you.

The downside is what it doesn’t do. It’s one person, one time, no group. If the match is wrong — different energy, nothing in common beyond the five listed interests, an awkward hour — there’s no fallback plan for that evening, and no built-in reason for either of you to see each other again. It’s a well-designed way to have one conversation. Whether that conversation becomes anything depends entirely on what the two of you do next, which is exactly the part an algorithm can’t help with. And because it launched in Los Angeles first, availability outside a handful of cities can be thin.

Timeleft: matched into a table, weekly

Timeleft runs weekly dinners that seat small groups of strangers matched by personality, with no messaging beforehand — you don’t know who you’re meeting until you sit down. It’s reportedly seated more than three million guests since launching in 2020, which suggests the format works for enough people to be worth taking seriously.

The structural advantage over a one-to-one match is real: a table of five or six strangers has more room for the evening to go well even if you and any one person don’t click. If two people at the table hit it off, that’s a bonus, not the whole point of the night. And a fixed weekly slot — same day, same city, new table — gives you something closer to the repeat structure that actually builds familiarity, if you keep going.

The catch is that “if you keep going” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Because there’s no continuity between weeks — different table, different strangers, most weeks — it can end up producing a string of pleasant but disconnected evenings rather than an actual friendship. You leave having had a good time and not necessarily anyone’s number. It’s also a dinner, specifically, which means it costs money every time and assumes you like eating in front of new people, which not everyone does easily.

Meetup: groups, and whoever shows up

Meetup is the oldest of the three by two decades and works on a completely different logic. Instead of matching you to a person, it matches you to a group organized around something specific — a hiking club, a board game night, a language exchange — and you show up to whatever the group is already doing. It’s free, with unlimited groups and events, and reportedly has around 60 million members, which makes it less a startup bet and more established infrastructure at this point.

The advantage is that Meetup groups often run on a real schedule: the same hiking club meets the same Saturday every month, the same board game group meets the same bar every Tuesday. That’s the single most useful ingredient in actually making a friend as an adult — not meeting someone interesting once, but seeing the same faces enough times that familiarity has time to build. Repetition does more than intensity. One good conversation with a stranger rarely turns into a friendship on its own; six mediocre ones with the same person, spaced out over a couple of months, often do.

The disadvantage is that Meetup puts almost all the effort back on you. There’s no algorithm deciding who you’ll click with — you have to pick the group, show up cold, and do the work of talking to whoever’s there, some of whom will be more welcoming than others. Group quality varies enormously by city and by organizer; a thriving group in one neighborhood might be three people and an empty room in another. And because anyone can start a group, there’s no floor on how well-run it will be.

What this actually means for an evening

None of these apps solve loneliness. What they solve, at best, is the friction of arranging a first meeting — the part where you’d otherwise spend a tired Tuesday night deciding whether to text someone and inventing reasons not to.

If the honest problem is “I don’t know anyone here,” a one-to-one match like Buffet is a reasonable low-effort first move, precisely because the bar is one conversation, not a whole social life. If the honest problem is “I want low-stakes practice being around new people without the pressure of a one-on-one,” a group dinner format like Timeleft removes some of that pressure, as long as the cost and the lack of continuity between weeks don’t bother you. If the honest problem is “I want to build something that lasts,” a recurring group through Meetup — or a library programme, or a run club, or any other route with a fixed time and place — is the better bet, because it’s built around the thing that the research keeps coming back to: seeing the same people, repeatedly, on a schedule you don’t have to reinvent each week.

The unglamorous truth is that whichever app gets you through the door once, the actual work is going back a second and third time to something that has a fourth time built in. An app can hand you the first evening. It can’t hand you the fifth one — that part is still yours.