I find it hard to believe anyone can have such an incredibly clairvoyant understanding of the tech industry that they manage to see Mozilla as an evil megacorporation, yet at the same time failing to see any fundamental problem with Brave.
It could be a lot of things going on other than just sexism, but I cannot help but feel like any time a woman takes the lead in an open source organization a bunch of often vague but always hateful discourse follows in open source forums. Most people are of course fine, but a toxic minority will usually manage to get some weird discourse going that spreads to anyone taking whatever they spew on face value.
Often it can be hard to distinguish valid criticism from less than valid criticism, and in the case of big organizations there is always valid critiques to be made, so I don’t blame people all that much for falling for it. Still, being a happy user of both GNOME and Mozilla products for more than a decade, it tickles me just how much hatred these projects receive online.
That’s my five cents anyway.
It takes time to build friendships. If you meet people for an activity that’s a start, but if you don’t feel like any of them are friend material (or they’re too busy) you need to branch out. Try finding a larger/different group that does that activity, or better yet, try out something else.
Volunteering tends to be a great starting point.
Friendships often start with a leap of faith of sorts - you hang out in a given context, and at some point somebody takes the next step (wanna grab a beer/grab lunch/come for dinner/go to the game/whatever)
You kind of do things that are a bit ahead of your current level of friendship, and then if it works out you’ve managed to upgrade.