Making friends in Toronto.

It is one of the most social cities in the country and one of the loneliest, and those two facts are related.

If you have moved here and found it hard to meet people, nothing is wrong with you. Toronto is a city of about three million people where a very large share arrived recently, work long hours, and commute far enough that a weeknight plan costs two hours before anyone has said hello.

Halfof Torontonians were born outside Canada, so a huge number of people are starting their social life from nothing.

Everyoneis busy, and the default answer to a vague plan is a rain check that never gets cashed.

The gapis not wanting friends. It is having a reason to meet a specific person at a specific time.

Why the usual advice does not work

"Join a club"

Good advice that skips the hard part. A run club gets you into a room with people, which is the easy half. The difficult half is turning a person you nod at weekly into someone you would text on a Saturday, and clubs are not designed to do that.

"Use an app"

Most social apps are dating apps with the labels changed. You are shown a face, you judge it in half a second, and then the conversation has to survive on its own with nothing pushing it anywhere. Chats go quiet after four days because nobody wants to be the one who suggests meeting.

"Say yes to everything"

Exhausting, and it does not scale. Most invitations are to things you do not enjoy with people you have nothing in common with. Saying yes to all of them is how you end up tired and still without a group.

What actually works

Three things, and they are not complicated.

Something in common that is specific. Not "we both like music" but "we both play board games badly and take it seriously." Specific things give you something to do together, which is the whole point.
A deadline. Friendships that form do so because somebody proposed a real plan with a real date. Ones that do not, do not.
Meeting before you have decided who they are. The judgements you make from a photo are mostly noise, and they filter out people you would have liked.

What Kindred does about it

Kindred is built around exactly those three things.

You match on what you actually like doing. You see someone's interests, roughly how far away they are, and a few lines in their own words. You do not see a photo, and they do not see yours.

Photos unlock on day 3, for both people at the same moment, after you have already been talking. By then you know whether you get on, which is the part that matters.

By day 7 the app pushes you to make a plan. What to do, where, and when. When you meet, you scan each other's code to confirm it happened. That deadline is the whole reason chats here do not quietly die the way they do everywhere else.

It works three ways: as a couple looking for other couples to do things with, on your own looking for friends, or on your own for dating. You choose when you sign up, and the friends side has nothing romantic anywhere in it.

Is it for you?

Probably, if any of these sound familiar:

You moved to Toronto and your social life is still mostly work colleagues.
You are in a relationship and realised that couples do not have anywhere to meet other couples.
Your friends have moved to the suburbs, had kids, or drifted, and you have not replaced them.
You are tired of apps where the first and last thing that matters is a photograph.
You are queer, or trans, or new to the country, and you want somewhere that treats that as ordinary rather than as a category.

What it costs, plainly

Kindred is free for everyone, always: the full app and every feature, with no paid tier, no subscription, no card and nothing to cancel. No advertising, no analytics, no tracking, nothing sold or shared.

Kindred is open in Toronto.

An app like this only works if there are people near you, and Toronto is where the most of them are, so you can open it in your browser right now. The phone apps are on the way.

Open Kindred

Other cities

Kindred works anywhere, and Toronto is where it started, so it is the city with the most people on it. There are pages for Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa, and a set of guides on meeting people generally.

A word about safety

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 a friend where you are going, sort out your own way home, and never send anyone money. The safety section sets out exactly what we do and what we cannot do.