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.
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.
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.
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.
Three things, and they are not complicated.
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.
Probably, if any of these sound familiar:
Free to download, and the free tier is a real app rather than a locked door. Kindred is $0.99 a month with the first month free. Kindred+ is $2.99. There is no advertising anywhere in it, no analytics, and nothing is sold or shared, which is the reason it costs anything at all.
An app like this only works if there are people near you, so Kindred is opening in one city before anywhere else. Leave your email and you get the link the day it opens, plus Kindred free for good and three months of Kindred+.
Kindred opens one city at a time and Toronto is first, but the order after that is decided by where people are waiting. There are pages for Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa, and a set of guides on meeting people generally.
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.