Reading these comments makes me feel really good about what I'm trying to do with my startup, Krewe (https://www.gokrewe.com). It helps people make lasting, meaningful friendships that they can actually see and do stuff with everyday. It places people into a small social group where everyone lives within a half mile radius, and then encourages them to stick together and meet up often. There really is no reason why we all shouldn't have a close group of friends in our neighborhood, no matter how old we are, we just need an organization to help make those introductions and connections.
How well does it facilitate discrimination? For instance, in the small town I'm stuck in at the moment, most people are probably religious, and I definitely don't want to become friends with any of them. So a service that lets you find people living near you to be friends with would need to allow me to discriminate against people like that easily, or I'm not going to bother using it.
It sounds like (without looking at your site: it's blocked for me) you're basically just setting up something like a dating site, but with a focus on meeting friends nearby rather than dating partners.
I've never seen a dating site (except Tinder) which didn't have basic properties plainly visible for every person in their profile: sex, age, marital/relationship status, religion, ethnicity, kids, and usually a bunch more like pets, income, job, etc. People discriminate when looking for dating partners all the time, and for good reason. If you're a 20-year-old hetero atheist female, you're probably not going to want to date a 70-year-old hetero evangelical female. It's not that different when looking for friends; most people form friendships starting from some shared trait or experience, and tend to avoid people they aren't likely to get along with. Religion is a pretty big factor here: a devout Muslim is not likely to get along with a devout Jew or Christian, and similarly an liberal atheist or agnostic is not likely to get along with a Bible-thumping conservative Christian.
So why wouldn't you want to help people find people they can get along with? If all you're doing is trying to push together people because they just happen to leave within a half-mile of each other, that's doomed to failure IMO.
There are existing fairly-good mechanisms for people looking to network whose primary criteria is shared religion (shared absence of religion has somewhat weaker tools in many locations, and I suppose a tool focusing specifically on that audience might be valuable.)
So, while religious filtering might be of some importance to some users of a new friend-finder tool, there are, I think, fairly good reasons to think that the people for whom it is most important are exactly the people that don't need a new tool at all -- people who network through their religious communities.
dragonwriter put it very well in terms of religion. Plus, I'm quite sure people of differing religions (even devote ones) can become friends. I do let people choose an age group and a category ('professional', 'creative', or 'blue collar') so you can be placed in a group of your peers. But I think having diversity in groups is very useful, and I'd hate to exacerbate social segregation.
Krewe is not a Tinder or Match.com marketed for making friends. It's doesn't work anything like that, because making friends is not like finding dates. I think what makes churches, as well as stuff like schools, sports teams, fraternities, community service organizations, etc, so great at helping people form lasting, meaningful friendships and relationships (and why people love them so much) is that they really are just a group of people getting together often. You don't need to find the absolute best or most compatible people for you--you get to have multiple friends of varying closeness after all. You just need to have access to people who you can see frequently, build connections with, become involved in each other's lives, and create a culture of new, shared interests, inside jokes, traditions, etc. It's really how human society has worked since its very inception.
Just from reading your description, this sounds awesome! I thought about building something very similar. Especially as someone who has moved around quite a bit, it can be hard to make friends in new places.
Hey also your site seems to be down at: https://gokrewe.com/
It looks like it only works if you add the www. in front
