Yes having more connection with your community can help get more friends and a richer social life which can be helpful, but look at how insular people within communities over time have become now that we are now bound to the only interaction with those directly around us, via travel and communication.
online and even better local and also online groups are what I am going to argue would be the best way forward. Looking at the rAbetterWorld's consensus engine and how it could help people male friends and combat loneliness I see how having easy ways for people to interact with those around them and discuss common interests could happen.
The idea is that a website or something like this and the other website but also like many other aspects of other websites; like how one painting is like another because they both have color you might say. The websites's main idea is to find consensus on a topic, but the topic can be anything and there would be cross-subject like links for related things, but how related they are is something people could vote on and over time a consensus could be reached. In fact voting on everything is sort of the idea, but there are many types of votes that mean specific things. here though say we have a community of people and they are interacting on a popular topic, they could sort if by locality and talk to those around them. Now the idea here Quickly falls apart from what we might ever see happen because all the users in this theoretical system have to be verified like being registered to vote. Once verified you or any of your anonymous child accounts and be banned forever and your contributions reversed if the rules are violated too many times, and worst is who decides such a thing, the rest of the people who are eligible to vote on that topic. of course the votes are weighted based on your knowledge of a subject, but the questions about what is relevant are chosen by voting. Not all that voting happens from inside the group thou