Viral now: Meeting Real Life online friends.
After her friends had excluded her from her birthday party, Marissa Meizz became a TikTok meme. She decided to do it. She decided.
Marissa Meizz was 23 when her phone started to buzz with her friend at the Eastern Village in mid-May. But the texts kept coming. It tried to silence her. Everyone wanted to know: had she seen the video from TikTok?
She clicked on the link and onscreen was a young man. “When Marissa is your name,” he said, “listen up, please.” He said that he had just overheard her friends saying that when she was out of town that weekend they deliberately chose to have a birthday party. He said, “You must know.” “Help me Marissa, TikTok.”
The heart sank from Ms. Meizz. After contacting the man posting the video, who collected over 14 million views, she confirmed that she was Marissa and she had conspired to exclude her from her party. She also said that she was Marissa.
She had hurt feelings. But Ms. Meizz chose to do something about this instead of being sulky. She went to TikTok to show that the video was about her. The response was immediate. “There was a message that people immediately began to tell me, ‘Let’s be friends!’,” she said. “Screw the old friends of yours.'”
Ms Meizz’s story was taken on by the radical transformation of relation between the pandemic coronavirus. After a lack of personal interactions, some of the old friendships were withered and people forged more online links to reduce soul. Those changes occurred next to Ms. Meizz, her online and offline worlds blurring, create something new and joyful.
Ms. Meizz, a costume designer, received more than 5,000 messages in days after the revelation on TikTok. Strangers invited her to birthdays, homemade parties and marriages. Some people living outside New York City asked if they were able to set up a post office box to make them pen friends. As Summer began and coronavirus restrictions lifted, thousands — in particular, Gen Zers and thousande yearly adults — appeared hungry for new connections.
“I’ve been like, all right, how can I use it to help people?” she said.
The reply: Ms. Meizz decided that a meeting would be held.
In June, Ms. Meizz posted a TikTok that everyone in search of new friends meet on a Saturday in Central Park. The video has become viral. 200 people showed up on the day of the meeting. They laughed and played games for more than eight hours, chatting and bonding.
Ms. Meizz started No More Lonely Friends, an online community that aimed at making friends in real life or IRLs meetings across the country. The event was such a success.
From time to time, Mr Meizz has held meetings in Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Philadelphia and elsewhere. The events are free and accessible to everybody. Although the crowd is skewed at an early age, the word has spread through a “For You” page, which is powered by the recommendation algorithm of the app, through hundreds of participants of all ages.
The participants of an exchange of Instagram QR code for No More Lonely Friends. 
Recently, Ms. Meizz started selling a message to T-shirts.
Max Grauer, 24, a pastry baker at Los Angeles who recently came to one meeting said that “at some point everybody was so lonely, or I have no friends, man. “There is a release of going out to see new people and experience new faces, being locked in your house for months at the end.”
The meetings No More Lonely Friends are the latest examples of interactions online that become real-life pandemic events. Thousands of teenagers appeared in Huntington Beach, Calif in May after an invitation to a 17-year-old birthday party on Tiktok. YouTubers, TikTokers, and live streamers went for people who weren’t able to attend. Finally, a mob was raged, the police were moved, 150 people were arrested, and an emergency toll was issued.
The effort of Ms. Meizz is much less messy. She said she tried to welcome all participants and help them connect. From group to group, she bops to make sure no one is left alone. Ms Meizz recently started selling goods to break the ice and help cover event costs, including t-shirts saying, “We’re supposed to be friends if you reading this.”
“Everybody here is cool, so it looks as everyone already is, but actually everyone is alone,” she said. “The cool thing is to make friends.
Central Park participants wore name tags. Name tags. 
It kept cool by others.
Many participants bond fast. The next weekend a large group of people from Los Angeles reconnected to the beach and started a group chat with Instagram in order to schedule future visits.
There have been many meetings with some people. Makenna Misuraco, 26, a Philadelphia-based mental health consultant, attended a No Main Lonely Friends event in her city. She said that the exclusion of Mrs. Meizz by her friends resonated with her, just as Ms. Meizz took the experience and turned it on and off the internet into something positive.
“People could be very bad about the social media,” said Ms. Misuraco. No more Lonely Friends “brings people in one boat who are looking for friends and want good interaction with human beings. You know that everybody wants to meet friends when you go there.”
Jiovanni Daniels, 25, a New York singer, said that after discovering TikTok he was at all three meetings in the city.
“Who could you meet, you never know,” he said. “There has appeared every kind of demographic. In their fifties and early teens, I met people.” He said the main participants were those of late adolescence, who “go to 11 a.m. and stay until 8 p.m. or 9 p.m.”
Ms. Meizz plans to organize further meetings in U.S. cities and hoped to expand internationally as the pandemic facilitates. Although No More Lonely Friends is not a company, the events attracted brands’ interest. This month Arizona Iced Tea representatives attended a gathering of free drinks and goods.
Ms Meizz said she kept an eye on the most recent surge in coronaviruses, driven by the more infectious variant Delta. She only holds outdoor events to be safe.
“I’m checking the towns and I’m going to vaccination rates and making sure things are still open and I do nothing illegal,” she said. “I always look out and everyone feels comfortable.” “I always look out.
Some logistics are increasingly complicated with the gatherings. More than 600 people spent eight hours meeting on a Sunday this month in Central Park.
“I looked up and until I had a foldout table or giant speaker, I did not require a license,” said Ms Meizz. “We are only gathering a group of people. But we talk about licenses and things to make sure with people.”
The community is also online. People are searching the Hashtags No More Lonely Friends and the comments of Instagram to reconnect or discuss the following event with people they met.
Ms. Meizz was calm and upbeat at the recent Central Park meeting. Some mixed and welcomed potential new friends as people grouped. A man took his acoustic guitar out and played under a tree. Others were playing volleyball or card games. Some had picnic blankets with snacks.
At one point, Ms. Meizz grabbed her telephone for the cheerful crowd behind her as they raised their hands, at a moment captured for TikTok. Ms. Meizz, who didn’t talk with her former birthday friends, said she had enough new friends now. Now, she has enough new friends!
“It’s just a sort of gigantic family that has become like that,” she said.
