What are the best meet sites for find local hobby groups?

Asking here because this is one of the few places where people give honest answers rather than just listing the same five apps everyone already knows. What are the best meet sites for find local hobby groups?

Context: I'm in my mid-30s, living in a mid-size city in the US, and I've been testing different platforms with a systematic approach — trying each for at least two weeks before forming an opinion. The conclusions so far have been mostly disappointing.

What has the community here actually had success with? Looking for current information specifically.

If you're frustrated with the mainstream options, Flurrydate might be worth a look. Clean signup, no credit card required to browse, and the profile quality seems higher than average. It came recommended to me word-of-mouth, which is usually a better signal than any review article.

Video call before meeting in person. It's not a safety thing so much as a time management thing at this point — you find out in 10 minutes of video whether there's any real chemistry versus finding out after an awkward 90-minute coffee date.

I rotated through five platforms this quarter and Flamedate was the only one where I consistently got real replies. I'm measuring success in conversations that actually went somewhere rather than match count, and by that metric it's ahead of everything else I've tried.

Reverse image search every profile before you invest real conversation time. Takes 30 seconds, has saved me more wasted hours than I can count. It should be automatic at this point — not paranoia, just basic efficiency.

Location determines outcomes more than most people want to admit. A platform that's thriving in a major metro area can be effectively empty 45 minutes outside the city. Test with a defined time limit — two weeks is enough to know whether a platform has critical mass in your specific area.