The apartment and the job have guides written about them. This is the part nobody prepares you for.
Toronto absorbs an extraordinary number of new arrivals every year, from other countries and from the rest of Canada. That means two things: you are extremely normal, and the city has an unusually large population of people in exactly your position who are also looking.
You will be busy and it will feel fine. Novelty carries you, and there is a lot of admin. The mistake almost everyone makes is treating the social part as something to deal with after everything else is sorted, because everything else is never sorted.
Do one thing now. Pick a single activity that meets weekly and start it in your first month, while you still have novelty energy. Not a new hobby, the one you already have.
This is the hard stretch, and it is worth knowing it is coming. The novelty is gone, the admin is finished, and the quiet arrives. Most people conclude around month six that Toronto is a cold, unfriendly city. It is really just the middle of a normal curve.
Do not stop. This is precisely when people quit the class or the league, two months before it would have started producing.
The things you planted in month two start paying. The person you have now seen twenty times becomes someone you text. This is the entire mechanism, and there is no shortcut through it.
The one habit that matters most. Be the person who names a day. Toronto is full of warm conversations that never become plans, and whoever proposes the specific Thursday gets the friendship.
Kindred is launching in Toronto first, because an app like this only works if there are people near you. You are matched on what you actually like doing and roughly how far away someone is, you talk for three days before anyone sees a photo, and on day 7 the app asks for a plan with a date, a place and a time.
There is more on the city generally on the Toronto page, and on arriving in the country on the newcomers guide.
Most people describe roughly a year to feel settled, with months four to eight being the hardest stretch. Things started in the first month tend to begin producing friendships somewhere around month nine, which is why quitting a group at month six is the most common and most costly mistake.
Settlement and newcomer organisations, public libraries, recreational leagues, classes and volunteering shifts all work, and all repeat on a schedule. Other recent arrivals are the highest yield group, and in a city where roughly half the population was born outside Canada there are a great many of them.
Not unfriendly so much as busy and spread out. People are generally warm in conversation and slow to convert that into plans, and a cross city weeknight meeting can cost two hours in travel. Building socially close to home changes the experience substantially.
Kindred is opening here before anywhere else. Join the launch list and you get Kindred free for good, plus three months of Kindred+.
Kindred 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.