How to Find People Who Share Your Interests Online
The honest short version: people who share your interests are everywhere online — the hard part is finding a format where you actually talk to them, not just scroll past them. Most of the internet is built for broadcasting at people who like the same things you do. Finding people is easy; having a real conversation with them is the rare part. This guide covers the four routes that genuinely lead to conversations, and what each one is actually good at.
Route 1: Communities built around the thing itself
Every interest has a home: subreddits, Discord servers, Facebook groups, hobby forums, fan wikis. The people there are pre-filtered — everyone arrived because of the interest — so the "do we have anything in common" question is answered before you type a word.
The trade-off is pace and format. Communities are mostly asynchronous text: you post, you wait, half the replies arrive tomorrow. Great for depth and for learning; slow if what you want is an actual back-and-forth with a human tonight.
Route 2: Forums and comment sections
The quiet, underrated option. Long-running forums and the comment sections of niche blogs and channels are full of people who care deeply about one subject and have been arguing about it, happily, for years. Jumping into a live thread about something you genuinely know is one of the fastest ways to be seen as "one of us".
Again, though: text, delayed, and public. A conversation there can take a week to reach the depth a five-minute voice chat reaches on day one.
Route 3: Group chats and events
Group voice channels, watch parties, online meetups — these fix the pace problem. Real-time, real voices, real reactions. The new problem is the crowd: group conversations are dominated by whoever talks most, and one-to-one connection is hard to build in a room of twelve people talking over each other. Great fun, poor depth.
Route 4: Random video chat, with your interest as the opener
The format we built Chatingly around, so judge our bias accordingly — but the mechanics are simple and worth stating honestly. Matching is random: you meet whoever is next. The twist is what you bring — pick a topic you care about beforehand, take a ready-made opener from our starters library, and carry that line into the call.
In other words, Chatingly does not find people who share your interests — it gives you a place to turn your interest into a first line, so you can talk about it with whoever you randomly meet. What that buys you, compared to the routes above:
- Speed. From "I feel like talking about films" to asking a stranger a real film question in under a minute.
- Depth. It is one-on-one by design — no crowd, no performing for a room.
- Aliveness. A face, a voice, real-time reactions. The closest thing online to striking up a conversation at a concert or a convention.
- Low stakes. No profile to maintain, no post history to live up to. If the chat does not click, you skip and the next match loads in seconds.
The honest limit, twice over: the person you meet is random, so some chats will not land on your topic at all — a good opener just means you find out fast and skip on. And the format is built for conversation, not community — if you want a group that remembers you next week, route 1 is still the answer. The two work well together: communities for depth over time, random chats for practice and serendipity.
Ready-made openers by topic live on the conversation starters page.
A quick word on actually showing up
Whichever route you pick, the people who succeed at finding their people online share one habit: they talk first. They post the comment, join the thread, tap the match button. Shared interests only turn into conversations when someone opens their mouth — and on a video call, that someone gets to be you in the easiest possible setting, because talking to strangers is much simpler when you already have your first line in hand.
Pick one route from this list and use it this week. If you pick ours, we will see you on camera — bring your topic, and see who it lands with.