making friends and influencing people

A pandemic does makes things more difficult. My own experience on making irl friends in later life is that voluntary or community activity is probably the only reliable route, for me at least.

Cliques in general are probably not worth the price of entry in terms of effort and commitment balanced against the payoff of belonging (not sure whether there is an ilx clique in practice however).

My bf wants to make friends in his new home, a small town, and he literally cold-called someone who does the same artisanal craft as him and asked if they could ever get together and talk shop and the guy was nice (if surprised) but never called him back. Now Christopher wanders forlornly around the house going, "Bobby, I hardly knew ye" and so on.

In short, even for the boldest, it's not easy. And Christopher is, I have to say, pretty magnetic and not very forgettable so I wouldn't be too hard on yourself.

Thanks for these thoughts. The ILX aside just plays into my uncertainty with how interesting people find me overall. It's definitely self pity confirmation bias to focus on the many(?) times where my more thoughtful posts are not engaged with, but I feel like it's realistic to say that I am nowhere near a notable personality. Could be for lots of reasons! Bad timing, avoiding controversial stances, avoiding confrontation, low frequency of posts, whatever. But IRL I am not often sought out either, so it's a bit of soul searching to figure out what I can do better cumulatively.