I really love the way you describe your own friend-making experiences, particularly the fact that you seem to be the driving force between connecting groups of people into new friendships. I am terrible at this, and it just seems to require so much energy! I think it's in part because I don't like being the one to organise events, because I have this horror of imposing or making people feel like they're obligated to attend social events, and so in the end I never organise anything! It's hard to be the social hub if you're terrified of organising events and inviting people to them!

I think the failure mode of personal sharing is scaring people off with oversharing and talking too much (which I know I've done both IRL and online) but for the most part I've learned not to take this too personally.

This is very true, and certainly reflects my own experiences. I think in most instances it's probably me being the oversharer, although there have been a couple of rare occurrences where I felt that someone was imagining a degree of frienship between us that I didn't feel, which is always uncomfortable.

I hope that when things return to something approaching 'normal' you'll be able to pick up those local friendships where you left off. The pandemic has had a strange, distorting effect on people's social lives.