you know who hasn't lost their third places? your homophobic evangelical uncle. he knows his neighbors names and has guided discussions with them every sunday.
when i was growing up in the church i would participate in worship with my neighbors every sunday and recreation at minimum every wednesday. the most common hardship i see expressed on the exmormon subreddit is the shock of suddenly losing anything resembling a community. there just isn't a secular analogue for what the church provides.
and creating spaces for community to happen in. (we don't say "building community" because, well, it's a lot more like a garden than a building. we can't force it to happen, we just have to create the preconditions and nurture it as it grows)
the vocabulary around third places is very useful - coffee shops, bars, libraries, hackspaces, anywhere people can just hang out and relax and maybe talk to each other
another useful concept we think in terms of for this stuff is Jane Jacobs' concept of "sidewalks". see, interesting stuff happens on a sidewalk because nobody needs an excuse for being there. because it's where everyone goes on their way to other places. this of course does not happen in modern suburbs because of enclave structure, redlining, etc. it also does not happen online because we all just teleport directly to our destinations, if you'll pardon the metaphor.
we need to be doing this both physically, and digitally. we can't abandon either of those fronts.
having tried to do this awhile ago, a big difference between religious groups and community groups is it's way harder to get people to tithe to their friends/neighbors, but pretty much any meeting space requires cash. Church groups double dip because of the generational wealth of the tithes stored in church property. But without some level of non-fickle income for the group it becomes impossible to plan ahead without organizers spending n people worth of money, so you really need it to scale.
so, that's a thing to be thinking on
Fortunately I didn't lose anything when I left Mormonism, as I had lost any semblance of community waaaaay before that. I was neurodivergent enough that everyone could tell and was annoyed by me, and I could tell but didn't know how to "fix it". So now that I've left I don't have any reason to ever go back, but I still remember those fleeting moments where I did feel like a part of something.
