Well that hard to do at 46
When I was 18, networking was hard because I didn't know anyone in the industry I was trying to enter. Apparently at 46, it is hard because no one wants to make friends anymore (or something).
But no - networking, regardless of the stage you are at in life, is always as hard or as easy as you make it. If you have a genuine interest in the work you do and the people around you, it will be easy almost effortless. You'll show up to something and see someone you want to talk to, and you'll talk to them about what interested you. And soon you'll talk to them about what you do for work, and what you are really excited about. And then, purely because you will find something else interesting about another person, you will start another conversation, and the cycle repeats. By the end of the day, you've met a dozen new people and shared your passion with them. Do this every day for a month, and you will probably have some people talking to you about a new job.
Potential problems with this strategy:
- You aren't talking to people. In order for networking to work, you need to talk to people - after all, how are they going to recommend you a job if they don't know you exist? Also, most people don't count online connections for much - you have to talk to people in real life for them to trust you enough to recommend you a job.
- You aren't talking to enough people. If you go to the same spot every day and talk to the same people, you won't get very many results as all potential jobs must filter through those people. This is still better than not talking to anyone - but still, you are trying to expand your network. Ie, meet new people.
- You aren't talking to the right people. Of course, just meeting new people all the time is great for networking generally, but in order to get a job, you need to talk to the people who know about the jobs. Hence, you will be better off attending an industry conference or showing up to a local meetup group for your specialty, rather than showing up at a pickup soccer game or attending an art festival. Not to say that the latter can't have good opportinities - but the former will almost certainly have a higher hit rate.
- You look like shit. People judge you based on your appearance. Some will balk, and say that they shouldn't, and it is what is on the inside (like, I guess, technical expertise?) that counts. But everyone else understands that someone who doesn't care about their appearance is, in some way or another, either inept or self-sabotaging, since outward appearance clearly plays such a huge roll in success. This doesn't mean you need to drop 10s of thousands of dollars on cosmetic treatments in Turkey - but it does mean you should get a haircut and wear a well-fitting shirt. Maintaining a healthy bodyweight and healthy skin won't hurt either.
- You are needy. No one wants to give a job to someone who needs a job, because the people who are good at their jobs - ie, the people you want to hire - are rarely in need of a job. They get a job, then get offered more jobs while they are in that job, and are regularly moving to higher positions, getting more perks, and getting pay raises. They probably make enough money that they arent concerned about being unemployed for a bit when it does happen, and they will get snapped up instantly as soon as they want a new job, because people know they do excellent work. Hence, this sort of person showing up to an industry conference will mostly be interested in the point of the conference - learning new things, keeping up to date, meeting new people and learning about them. And they might mention that they aren't working right now and are interested in doing such and such - but they arent frothing at the mouth any time someone mentions an opening at their company. They are only interested in jobs that will make their life better because they get to work on something interesting with very good pay. And this sends strong signals that they are the sort of person that a company would like to hire.
- You are needy, so you don't mention you are looking for a job. You just read the last paragraph, and understand that everyone wants to hire the person who is just killing it in their career - but you aren't, so you try to hide this fact. Probably, you will try to hide it by not telling people you are looking for a job and playing close to the chest. This is also neediness, and you will come off as weird and untrustworthy. Humans are masters of reading others emotions - and so while they might not know you are trying to hide your desperation for a job, they can tell, deep in their subconscious, that something is off. And this will cause them to play things close to the chest as well.
- You are failing to incorporate the feedback you are given. You show up to something. You meet people and talk to them and take a genuine interest. You show up for the sake of whatever the gathering is, and don't hide what you are interested in from anyone. But you don't seem to be getting anywhere - why? Well, probably because people are sending you signals, but you are ignoring them. You are so caught up in your own world that you don't notice when someone is bored or uncomfortable or annoyed. You don't notice when someone makes a comment about your work history or skill level. And so you never actually improve at what you need to improve at to build a good network. If you are especially bad at this, having good friends who can give you direct feedback is invaluable.
- You actually are not very good at what you do relative to the competitiveness of your field. This should become obvious if you are successfully noticing peoples feedback. In this case, you should spend as much time as possible working on upskilling yourself, creating things you are proud of, and that you can show off to others and talk about. Ideally, find other people with the same interest to work together with you, which in itself would be expanding your network. Someone who has a work history they are proud of, who has a large portfolio of impressive work, or who runs their own independent business in their specialty (even if it doesnt make enough money to pay the bills) is infinitely more employable than someone who scrolls Lemmy during dead time at work, and assumes that they can only improve their skills by someone giving them a good project to work on during their paid time.
have no true friends or colleagues to reach out to.
This is BY FAR your biggest problem. Not so much that you don't have these people in your life as a simple fact, but the underlying issue of Why don't you have these people in your life? Step number 1 isn't that you need friends to ask for professional recommendations, it is that you need friends. Luckily, it isnt terribly difficult to make friends if you simply think of some things you are interested in, find gatherings of people interested in those same things, and show up! It doesnt matter if you are interested in fly fishing or olympic lifting or Magic the Gathering or collecting insects - in a sufficiently large metro area, you will be able to find your people. Then you can see that they are doing a thing, and show up! And then the next time they do a thing, show up again! Even if you feel like you didnt make a good first impression or that you weren't greeted very warmly, it is typically straightforward to build relationships if you just keep showing up again and again. If you can't do that due to something like agorophobia or social anxiety or physical limitations, then you need to find a way to solve that problem or work around it, because it will impact your ability to professionally network tenfold. Humans are social animals, and in order to emotionally function properly, you need a social support system - not people who will give you job opportunities (though that can be a nice side benefit) - but people who will emotionally support you when you are in the shit.
Now we all know about dating sites, but is there a open source site that is for meeting for friends, or even networking like LinkedIn but not so much bullshit?
As far as I know, there is no such site. People I know have had success building social networks via facebook groups, meetup.com, and bumblebff. Ymmv based on your location. But I do not know of any open source alternatives to these that actually have a large enough userbase to be good replacements. Yes, these are evil big tech companies that are destroying the world and stealing your data - I suggest you get over it and join them anyway. If you want, you can isolate them on a burner phone running a vpn, adding on whatever other privacy features you can think of to suit your particular level of paranoia. But that's the thing about networking - the value of a space is determined almost entirely by the value of the people inhabiting it. It doesnt matter if you have the best social network in the world if it has a total of 3 users. Just like caring about your appearance, not only does not joining these networks have a direct impact on your ability to make a good impression (or any impression at all) on the people you would like to know, but it also signals an unwillingness or inability to accept reality (people care about appearance; facebook is where you can find groups of people) and appropriately react to it (so I will put effort into my appearance; so I will join facebook groups to know what is going on in my area).
If not how would one go about creating such a space?
I have a friend who has been making/maintaining/running a small website that would be a decent replacement for Meetup for I think more than a decade now. As Meetup has been enshittifying for a while now, I'm considering hitting him up with an idea to improve the site and promote it to become a direct competitor.