I'm from Northern Europe and the problem with making friends is that you have to have an excuse to make friends - there has to be a pretense. Sure, a lot of sports, volunteer work, hobbies and so on and so forth emphasize that you will get to socialize, but you don't get away from the fact that you have to have some kind of pretext to meet new people.
I'm from UK and the same is true here. People make friends by doing things together, and spending time together doing similar activities, e.g. working in an office, playing football, going to school/uni together. Finding someone random to be friends with online is just plain wierd. I feel like this kind of 'hook-up' friendship is more acceptable in the US, especially SV.
In British culture we are only just getting over the social stigma of internet dating, and it is starting to become more widespread for people to be proud of meeting their spouses online, but meeting friends online is still a social hurdle, and arguably, less efficient than just turning up to a local football club.
It is a problem because you necessarily need to take the whole pretext as well - which is fine if you really like that pretext, less so if you don't. Maybe someone just wanted to meet new people and so she got a volunteer job for some organization. Now she has the job and has made some friends, but the job is weighing her down, because it turns out that she didn't care for that job in itself. "But", you say, "she could just find something she likes", but that might not be so easy. In her case, she needed to commit to a job, and it is often something of an investment like that when it comes to these pretexts - it's not merely a question of "casually drop by that thing I do whenever I feel like it, but I've committed to noone about doing with any regularity".
Hopefully she can quit her job and still maintain her friendships - but people also tend to compartmentalize, and without something like a common job, there isn't necessarily a compartment for her anymore.
I am not talking about merely needing to do something together to meet new people. I'm not talking about going down to the court and asking random people to shoot some hoops, and basketball being the pretext. I'm talking about "we need to work together or have met in some context where it was clear that we had stuff to do other than make friends with each other". There might not need to be a pretext after a friendship is established, but you sometimes need to get over that hurdle.
The premise of this and every tool like it is to bring people together with common interests. If you are actually interested in something, go do it and you'll meet people with that interest. It's far more important to do something than it is to express your interest on some friend meeting site, because people who are actually interested out pursuing their interest. You can also participate in an online community around the interest.
Saying you like hiking and snowboarding on a friend meeting site will never get you anywhere. Go to the mountain. Join the Mountaineers.
