The flakiness everyone complains about is mostly a traffic problem wearing a personality costume.
Ask anyone in LA about the social life and you get the same two words: everyone flakes. It is a real pattern and the usual explanation, that people here are shallow, is mostly wrong. The city itself produces the behaviour.
A friend on the other side of the city is a ninety minute round trip in traffic, for a coffee. That converts every invitation into a real cost, and it means people accept optimistically in the moment and reconsider on the day. From the outside it looks like flakiness. From the inside it is arithmetic.
No shared commute, no bumping into anyone, no walk to lunch. The unplanned contact that produces friendships in dense cities does not exist here, so everything has to be deliberately arranged.
Project based industries mean people are intensely close for four months and then dispersed. It produces a lot of warm acquaintances and comparatively few durable ones.
Which cuts both ways. People are open to meeting someone new, and they also have shallow roots and may leave.
The single highest value rule in this city. Make friends on your side of town. A good friend twenty minutes away beats a great one across the city, because you will actually see them.
Distance is not a detail in LA, it is the whole problem, so Kindred puts an approximate distance in the match itself along with what you actually like doing. On day 7 the app asks both people for a plan with a date, place and time, which turns the optimistic yes into something in a calendar.
No photos for the first three days, then both people see each other at once. Separate modes for couples, friends and dating.
Kindred opens one city at a time, starting with Toronto. Joining the list is how Los Angeles moves up.
Mostly geography rather than character. A cross town plan can cost ninety minutes of driving, so invitations get accepted enthusiastically in the moment and reconsidered when the day arrives. Friendships built within one side of town see dramatically less of this.
By replacing the accidental contact that walkable cities provide with something fixed and recurring, and by keeping it close to home. A standing weekly commitment twenty minutes away will outperform an exciting group an hour away every single time.
Run clubs, hiking groups, beach sports, outdoor markets, classes and recreational leagues, all chosen within your own part of the city. The climate makes free outdoor recurring activity the strongest option available, which is the one significant social advantage LA has.
Kindred opens one city at a time and the order is decided by where people are waiting. Join the 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.