There is nothing wrong with having online friends, but there is an obvious deficit in richness of communication and experience between online and meatspace interactions.

Perhaps in years to come VR will overcome that deficit, though.

How people find online communities that aren't so terrible that loneliness is preferable is beyond me. Of course, that's also true of meatspace communities, so maybe the problem is just me.

My recipe is trivial: look for people who are clearly brighter than me, and follow them; continue recursively with their friends as you get introduced.

This gave me a few brilliant real-life friends who I first had met back in the day e.g. on LiveJournal when it was still alive.

Heck, I met my wife online, and proposed online, back in 20th century. We're still happily together.

Problem is that people clearly brighter than me are not easy to come by.

...wait, that sounds like I mean that I think I'm really super smart. That isn't the case, I just don't meet many people, and those that I do meet I don't think are clearly brighter than me. The ones that are, usually don't really seem interested in being friends, so whatever.

Turns out these things aren't so simple as random people on the internet claim.

It's understandable. My method is actively see more people; online it's much simpler. Then get an idea of their interests, and if we share some of them, to try to communicate regarding these things. Soon enough you are somehow acquainted with a number of smart people. Even if few will become your friends, you keep learning from them, and keep getting leads to other potentially interesting people.

Try to frame it as an engineering task of a graph traversal optimization. Also, you have to be open; no people are going to check all boxes. Limit the filter to really important stuff.