Almost everyone is new, which removes the hardest part and replaces it with a different one.
Austin has grown fast enough that being new is completely ordinary. Say you moved here recently and the most common response is that they did too. That removes the single biggest obstacle newcomers face in older cities, where everyone already has a full life.
What it creates instead is churn, and a social scene where a lot of relationships are eight months old.
Compared with a city where circles formed at school, Austin is genuinely easy to enter. People say yes to things. The window for a newcomer is wide here and it does not stay wide anywhere forever, so use the first six months hard.
Which means few people have deep local roots, plans are loose, and groups reshuffle constantly. Friendships form fast and dissolve fast, and you will need more of them than you expect.
The summer does to Austin roughly what winter does to Chicago. For several months, outdoor daytime socialising stops being pleasant, and anything that depends on it stalls.
North, south, east and the suburbs are separate practical worlds. A friend on the wrong side of the river gets seen a third as often.
What works here. Move fast in your first months, aim for things that repeat weekly, and plan for the summer the way a northern city plans for winter.
Kindred matches on what you actually like doing and roughly how far away someone is, and asks both people for a real plan on day 7. In a city where everybody is friendly and everything is loose, the plan with a date on it is the scarce part.
No photos for the first three days, then both at once, and separate modes for couples, friends and dating.
Kindred works anywhere, Austin included, and you can use it in the browser today. It is only as good as the number of people near you who are on it.
Easier than in most American cities, because such a large share of the population arrived recently that being new is ordinary rather than awkward. The tradeoff is churn: many friendships here are young, groups reshuffle often, and people leave, so you generally need more connections than you would elsewhere.
Move indoors, the way northern cities move indoors in winter. Climbing gyms, classes, leagues, trivia nights and early morning outdoor activity all work through the hottest months, when afternoon socialising outdoors largely stops.
Yes. Traffic and sprawl mean that friends on the far side of the city get seen a fraction as often, so building socially within your own part of town is far more sustainable than trying to maintain a circle spread across it.
Kindred is open in Austin today, and it is worth saying plainly that it started in Toronto and is densest there, so how useful it is in Austin depends on how many people near you have joined. You can open it in your browser right now and see for yourself. The phone apps are on the way.
Open KindredKindred does not run background checks and does not verify that anyone is who they say they are. No app does, whatever it implies. Meet somewhere public the first few times, tell someone where you are going, sort out your own way home, and never send anyone money. The safety section is honest about exactly what we do and what we cannot do.